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Stowers Institute Appoints Scientific Advisory Board Member
Dr. Rossant is Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She is also a University Professor at the University of Toronto, and Professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics and the Department of Obstetrics/Gynaecology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse embryo using both cellular and genetic manipulation techniques. She is also involved in stem cell research and is known for her discovery of a novel placental stem cell type, the trophoblast stem cell. She serves as Deputy Director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network. She also directs the Centre for Modelling Human Disease in Toronto, a research organization that is undertaking genome-wide mutagenesis in mice to develop new mouse models of human disease. Dr. Rossant trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, United Kingdom and has been in Canada since 1977, first at Brock University and then in Toronto. In 2000, Dr. Rossant was elected to the Royal Society of London in recognition of her discoveries in the regulation of early development. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Additional members of the SAB include: Douglas A. Melton, Ph.D.
Dr. Melton was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 for notable research in molecular embryology. Work from his laboratory has advanced knowledge of how cell fates are specified during vertebrate development through studies on the localization of DNA transcripts in eggs and the proteins responsible for the induction of mesoderm and neural tissue. Dr. Melton, who joined the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 1999, earned a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Illinois, a B.A. in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in molecular biology at Trinity College and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University. He is currently the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor in the Natural Sciences at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and co-director of Harvard's Stem Cell Institute and Center for Genomic Research. Michael Levine, Ph.D. Dr. Levine was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 in recognition of his analysis of regulatory events that govern segmentation and dorsal-ventral polarity in fruit fly embryos. His work provided an example of combinatorial regulation at a complex enhancer and established new paradigms for transcriptional control. Dr. Levine was appointed to the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 1998. He has a Ph.D. from Yale University and is Director of the Center for Integrative Genomics and Professor of Genetics in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California-Berkeley. Susan L. Lindquist, Ph.D. Dr. Lindquist was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 for revealing the molecular basis of how cells respond to extreme stress by producing proteins designed to prevent and repair damage. She elucidated how heat shock proteins are regulated post-transcriptionally and how they produce stress tolerance by modulating the activity and aggregation state of other proteins. Dr. Lindquist received her undergraduate degree in microbiology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and her Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. She joined the University of Chicago faculty, where she subsequently became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Lindquist was appointed to the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 2000. She served as Director of the Whitehead Institute and is currently a member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eric N. Olson, Ph.D. Dr. Olson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 for his integrated use of biochemical, genetic, and molecular biological methods to resolve how tissues are determined and differentiated in multicellular organisms. His showed how myogenic and cardiogenic transcription factors control organogenesis of skeletal muscle and heart tissues in fruit flies and laboratory mice. Dr. Olson, who joined the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 2000, received a B.A. degree in biology and chemistry from Wake Forest University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Wake Forest University Medical School. He currently chairs the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, serves as director of the Hamon Center for Basic Research in Cancer, and holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Basic Cancer Research and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research. Charles J. Sherr, MD, Ph.D. Dr. Sherr was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 for notable discoveries in retrovirology, oncogene characterization and function, receptor signaling, and cell cycle research. Dr. Sherr, who joined the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 2000, received an A.B. degree from Oberlin College and M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the National Cancer Institute before joining St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is now a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the Herrick Foundation Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Tumor Cell Biology. About the Stowers Institute |
