Advisors
Papers highlighted in the Milestones were chosen with the help of a panel of experts listed below.
Advisors list
- Robin Allshire
- Michael Green
- Danesh Moazed
- Geneviève Almouzni
- Shiv Grewal
- Benno Müller-Hill
- James Broach
- Mark Groudine
- Vincenzo Pirrotta
- Stephen Buratowski
- Michael Grunstein
- Wolf Reik
- Steve Busby
- Nouria Hernandez
- Azim Surani
- Pierre Chambon
- Peter von Hippel
- Robert Tjian
- Joan Conaway
- Thomas Jenuwein
- Marc Vidal
- Ronald Conaway
- Peter Jones
- Fred Winston
- Richard Ebright
- James Kadonaga
- Cynthia Wolberger
- Sarah Elgin
- Roger Kornberg
- Jerry Workman
- Peter Geiduschek
- Robert Landick
- Carl Wu
- Thomas R Gingeras
- Barbara Migeon
- Richard Young
Robin Allshire
Robin Allshire is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Chromosome Biology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh for studies using bovine papillomavirus as the basis for minichromosomes in mammalian cells, which were carried out at the MRC Human Genetics Unit with Chris Bostock and Ed Southern. As a postdoctoral researcher with Nick Hastie at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, he studied human telomeres and their shortening with age. After a brief spell as a visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where he switched to working on chromosomes in fission yeast, he returned to Edinburgh. There, in 1990, he set up his laboratory at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, studying gene silencing at centromeres and telomeres in fission yeast. In 2002 his laboratory moved to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, where he continues to study how particular chromatin structures are formed, leading to the assembly of active centromeres and facilitating normal chromosome segregation.
Geneviève Almouzni
Dr Almouzni obtained her PhD from the University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, with Dr M. Méchali at the Jacques Monod Institute, Paris, and did her postdoctoral training at NIH, Bethesda, USA. She then established her group at the Curie Institute in Paris. She is now head of the department of Nuclear Dynamics and Genome Plasticity at the Curie Institute in Paris. Her research interests have been the interrelationships between nuclear organisation and DNA metabolism, including DNA replication, repair and transcription. The unifying theme underlying her work is the wish to understand the principles governing nuclear organization and function, and the coordination of these events to ensure the maintenance of cellular identity throughout cell divisions. Special emphasis is given to developmental context and genotoxic stress in understanding the importance of factors involved in chromatin dynamics. Her interest in the three-dimensional organization of the nucleus is aimed at understanding how specific domains, such as pericentric heterochromatin, can be stably maintained.
James Broach
James R. Broach is Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton, where he conducts research on the role of chromatin in gene expression and on intercellular signalling networks, focusing on pathways associated with cellular oncogenes. Dr Broach received his PhD in 1973 in Biochemistry from UC Berkeley. He was a staff member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and an Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook before joining the Princeton faculty in 1984. Dr Broach was a founder of the biotechnology company Cadus Pharmaceuticals, and served as Director of Research at the company from 1992-1999. He was also an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, an editor of Cell and Molecular and Cellular Biology, and has been a director of the Life Sciences Research Foundation since 1989 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology since 1994. He has published more than 140 scientific articles, primarily on yeast molecular genetics, and is the editor of a five-book series detailing the molecular biology of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He is currently the Associate Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Associate Director of the Lewis Sigler Institute.
Stephen Buratowski
Stephen Buratowski is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. His research is on eukaryotic gene expression, with a focus on RNA polymerase II and its associated factors. Recent work from his laboratory has elucidated mechanisms by which transcription is linked to mRNA-processing events and chromatin modifications. After receiving his BA degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, Buratowski did his PhD work with Phil Sharp at MIT, where he studied transcription initiation. He then spent four years as a Whitehead Institute Fellow before moving to Harvard Medical School.
Steve Busby
Steve Busby is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research group has been based at the University of Birmingham for more than 20 years, and he has spent most of that time studying the fundamental mechanisms of regulation of bacterial gene expression.
Pierre Chambon
Pierre Chambon is Professor Emeritus of the Collège de France, Founder and Honorary Director of the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (Université Louis Pasteur, CNRS, INSERM), and Director of Génopole Strasbourg Alsace-Lorraine and the Institut Clinique de la Souris. Dr Chambon is a leading expert in the field of gene structure and regulation, nuclear signal transduction and retinoic-acid-dependent pathways. He has won numerous international prizes, including the 2004 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, for his pioneering work in these areas, and has more than 700 peer-reviewed publications. Dr Chambon is a member of the French Académie des Sciences and a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Dr Chambon serves on a number of editorial boards, including those of Cell, Molecular Cell and Genes and Development.
Joan Conaway
Joan Weliky Conaway is an Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. She received her AB in chemistry and biology from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD in cell biology from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she worked with Roger Kornberg. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, Joan was a faculty member in the Program in Molecular and Cell Biology at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, where she was also an Associate Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1997, Joan was a joint recipient with Ronald Conaway of the ASBMB-Amgen Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Joan has collaborated with Ronald Conaway since 1984 on fundamental mechanisms of RNA polymerase II transcription and its regulation. (Image courtesy of Don Ipock Photography)
Ronald Conaway
Ronald Conaway is an Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. He received AB degrees in physics and chemistry from Indiana University and his PhD in biochemistry from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he worked with I. Robert Lehman. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, Ron was a faculty member in the Program in Molecular and Cell Biology at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. In 1997, Ron was a joint recipient with Joan Conaway of the ASBMB-Amgen Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Ron has collaborated with Joan Conaway since 1984 on fundamental mechanisms of RNA polymerase II transcription and its regulation. (Image courtesy of Don Ipock Photography)
Richard Ebright
Richard H. Ebright is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute, and Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the structure, mechanism, and regulation of transcription complexes, and on development of inhibitors of bacterial transcription as potential antibacterial therapeutic agents. He received his AB degree (in Biology, summa cum laude) and PhD (in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) from Harvard University. He performed graduate research at Harvard and the Institut Pasteur, and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows.
Sarah Elgin
Dr Sarah C. R. Elgin is Professor of Biology, of Genetics, and of Education at Washington University in St Louis. She began studying chromatin structure while an undergraduate at Pomona College, working in the Caltech laboratory of James Bonner. After completing a PhD with Bonner exploring the role of non-histone chromosomal proteins, Dr Elgin did postdoctoral research with Leroy Hood, also at Caltech, developing approaches to study chromosomal proteins in Drosophila. Her continuing research in Drosophila has generated contributions to our understanding of nucleosome arrays, including detection and analysis of accessible regulatory regions (HS sites). Her current research focuses on heterochromatin structure and gene silencing, particularly the role of HP1, which was identified in Drosophila by immunofluorescent staining of polytene chromosomes. Studies of the fourth chromosome and pericentric heterochromatin in Drosophila suggest that targeting of heterochromatin formation depends on an RNAi-based mechanism that utilizes repetitive elements found at high density in these heterochromatic domains.
Peter Geiduschek
E. P. Geiduschek was born in Vienna, sheltered during World War II in England, and arrived in the USA in 1945. He attended Columbia University, New York City, and took his PhD in Physical Chemistry at Harvard. After teaching chemistry at Yale (punctuated by a two-year stint in the US Army) and the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Chicago's Committee on Biophysics in 1959. There, he was introduced to RNA polymerase by Sam Weiss, its discoverer, and to phage genetics and molecular biology during a sabbatical year with Richard Epstein in Eduard Kellenberger's Department of Biophysics at the University of Geneva. He has been at UCSD's Department of Biology (now the Division of Biological Sciences) since 1970, and served as Department Chair from 1981 to 1983 (and briefly as Co-Chair in 1994). The central theme of his research has been transcription and transcriptional regulation, with specific interests in transcriptional regulation in phage multiplication, eukaryotic transcription and, recently, archaeal transcription and its regulation.
Thomas R. Gingeras
Dr Gingeras received his PhD in Biology from New York University, followed by postdoctoral training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, under Nobel Laureate Dr Richard Roberts, as an American Cancer Society and National Institutes of Health Fellow (1976-1979). After this, Dr Gingeras became a Staff Scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1979-1983). He then accepted the position of Senior Scientist at the Salk Institute Biotechnology/Industrial Associates (SIBIA) (1983-1988) and became the Assistant Laboratory Director and Director of Molecular Diagnostics at SIBIA (1988-1990). In 1990, Dr Gingeras became Director of the Life Sciences Research Laboratory, Baxter Healthcare, Inc. (1990-1993), while keeping an appointment as Associate Adjunct Professor at the Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, (1991-1994). Currently, he is Vice President Biological Sciences at Affymetrix, Inc, and a member of the basic research division of Affymetrix, Affymetrix Laboratories (1993-present). He is the author and co-author of 84 manuscripts and 13 patents.
Michael Green
Dr Michael R. Green is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Professor of Molecular Medicine, and Director of the Program in Gene Function and Expression at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has a broad interest in the mechanisms that regulate gene expression in eukaryotes, and the role of gene expression in various human disease states. He received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and his MD-PhD degrees from Washington University School of Medicine. He was a postdoctoral fellow and then a faculty member at Harvard University until 1990 when he assumed his current position.
Shiv Grewal
Shiv Grewal began his scientific career at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he held the prestigious Cambridge-Nehru scholarship. In 1993, he joined National Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow to pursue his interests in the epigenetic control of gene expression. Apart from his pioneering work on the role of centromeric repeats in heterochromatin assembly, he showed that epigenetic imprints can be stably propagated through meiosis, and in some instances inherited in cis. He also identified factors involved histone modification as key components of the epigenetic marking process. Dr Grewal joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Assistant Professor in 1998, and was promoted to Associate Professor. In 2003, he joined the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda as a Senior Investigator. A recent discovery by Dr Grewal's laboratory, demonstrating a highly conserved connection between RNAi and heterochromatin, assembly has revolutionized current thinking on how complex genomes are assembled into higher-order chromatin structures. This important contribution was selected as Breakthrough of the Year 2002 by Science magazine. Dr Grewal is recipient of the prestigious Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, the NIH Merit Award and the Demerec-Kaufmann award.
Mark Groudine
Mark Groudine MD, PhD, is a Member of the Division of Basic Sciences and Deputy Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Before becoming Deputy Director of the Center, he served as Director of the Center's Division of Basic Sciences. He is also Professor and attending physician in the Department of Radiation Oncology, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Pathology, at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr Groudine received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Research in his laboratory focuses on the relationships between gene expression, chromatin structure and the organization of the interphase nucleus. Dr Groudine is a member the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Michael Grunstein
Michael Grunstein is Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He was born in Romania, and obtained his BSc degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his post-doctoral training at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he invented the colony hybridization screening technique for recombinant DNAs in David Hogness' laboratory. Soon after coming to UCLA in 1975 he pioneered the genetic analysis of histones in yeast and showed for the first time that histones are regulators of gene activity in living cells.
Nouria Hernandez
Dr Hernandez studied biology at the University of Geneva as an undergraduate. She obtained a PhD in 1983 from the University of Heidelberg working with Dr Walter Keller, who was then at the German Cancer Research Center, on mRNA splicing. She then joined the group of Dr Alan Weinber at Yale University as a postdoctoral fellow, and worked on 3' end formation of small nuclear RNAs in human cells. In 1987, she went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and started working on RNA polymerase II and III transcription of the human small nuclear RNA genes. She became a full professor in 1993, and joined the Howard Hughes Institute in 1994, first as an Associate Investigator and then, as of 1999, as an Investigator. In September 2005, after more than 18 years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Dr Hernandez moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and assumed the directorship of the new Center for Integrative Genomics.
Peter von Hippel
Peter von Hippel is a professor of chemistry and a member of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon, USA. He is also an American Cancer Society Research Professor of Chemistry. His research group uses biophysical approaches to study protein-nucleic-acid interactions that are involved in the function and regulation of the complexes that control RNA transcription and DNA replication. The experimental work of his laboratory is focused primarily on transcriptional regulation in Escherichia coli and on replication mechanisms in the bacteriophage T4 system.
Thomas Jenuwein
Over the last 10 years, Thomas Jenuwein, who is based at the IMP in Vienna, has been focusing on the functional characterisation of mammalian chromatin. In seminal discoveries, he and his team identified the first histone lysine methyltransferase and showed that the selective methylation of histone H3 at lysine 9 generates a high-affinity binding site for the chromo-domain of the HP1 proteins. These landmark findings established a biochemical explanation for the formation and propagation of silenced chromatin domains and for the functional organisation of chromosomes. Together, they represent one of the most important breakthroughs in chromatin research during the last two decades, and significantly advanced the entire field of epigenetic control. Research into the biological roles of histone lysine methylation is likely to uncover novel insights into normal and pathological development, will be relevant for chromosome stability and genome integrity, and will lead to a better understanding of cell lineage plasticity, nuclear reprogramming and the molecular nature of stem cells.
Peter Jones
Dr Peter A. Jones is Director of the University of Southern California/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Keck School of Medicine University of Southern California (USC). He is known for his studies on the molecular biology of cancer and of basic mechanisms of DNA methylation and its role in cancer and differentiation. Dr Jones was born in South Africa, raised and attended school in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and received his Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of London in 1973. He is currently the President of the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr Jones has received a variety of honours, including the Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute. In 1999 he was named Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at USC.
James Kadonaga
Jim Kadonaga received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from MIT, where he was awarded the American Institute of Chemists Certificate, as well as the Alpha Chi Sigma Prize. He carried out graduate studies with Jeremy R. Knowles at Harvard University, where he received AM and PhD degrees in chemistry. Dr Kadonaga then performed postdoctoral research as a Miller Research Fellow with Robert Tjian at UC Berkeley. During this period, he developed sequence-specific DNA-affinity chromatography, which he used for the purification and cloning of the transcription factor Sp1. In 1988, he joined the faculty of UC San Diego, where he presently serves as the Chair of the Section of Molecular Biology. His awards include selection as a Lucille P. Markey Scholar and a Presidential Faculty Fellow. His research interests include the regulation of transcription by RNA polymerase II, and chromatin assembly and dynamics.
Roger Kornberg
Roger Kornberg is in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford University. He received a PhD in chemistry from Stanford in 1972 for his demonstration of the diffusional motions of lipids in bilayer membranes, termed flip-flop and lateral diffusion. He was a postdoctoral fellow and member of the scientific staff at the Laboratory of Molecular biology in Cambridge, UK, from 1972 to 1975, where he discovered the nucleosome. He moved to his present position in 1978, where his research has focused on the mechanism and regulation of eukaryotic gene transcription. Notable findings include the demonstration of the role of nucleosomes in transcriptional regulation, the establishment of a yeast RNA polymerase II transcription system and the isolation of all the proteins involved, the discovery of the Mediator of transcriptional regulation, the development of two-dimensional protein crystallization and its application to transcription proteins, and the atomic structure determination of an RNA polymerase II transcribing complex. Kornberg's closest collaborator has been his wife, Dr Yahli Lorch. They have three children, Guy, Maya and Gil.
Robert Landick
Robert Landick began his scientific career as an organic chemist, but soon switched to molecular biology. After obtaining a PhD in Biological Chemistry from the University of Michigan, he began to study RNA polymerase and the structure and regulation of transcription complexes during postdoctoral training at Stanford. He continued this research while holding academic appointments at Washington University, St Louis, and then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has focused on the structure of the transcription elongation complex and the mechanisms that regulate RNA chain elongation by RNA polymerase, notably the mechanism of transcription pausing. While in St Louis, he helped launch single-molecule studies of transcription by teaming up with cell biologists, and combined bacterial genetics with biochemistry and molecular biology to dissect RNA polymerase structure and function. Since moving to Madison, he has continued work on the regulation of transcript elongation by bacterial RNA polymerase and human RNA polymerase II.
Barbara Migeon
Barbara Migeon is Professor in the Mckusick Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. After obtaining her MD, she received clinical training in paediatrics at Hopkins and in endocrinology at Harvard, before starting her genetics training at Hopkins. She is board-certified in paediatrics, biochemical genetics and cytogenetics. Professor Migeon was the founding director of the Hopkins PhD Program in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology, and is a member of the board of the DNA Methylation Society. Since the beginning of her research career she has been working towards an understanding of the molecular mechanisms of X inactivation in human cells, and the clinical consequences to both sexes of having a single active X chromosome.
Danesh Moazed
Danesh Moazed is currently an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz working on the structure and function of ribosomal RNA with Harry Noller. After postdoctoral studies at UCSF with Patrick O'Farrell and Sandy Johnson, Dr Moazed joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1998. Research in his laboratory is focused on understanding the mechanisms of assembly and propagation of epigenetic chromatin domains, and on the role of the RNA interference pathway in heterochromatin assembly.
Benno Müller-Hill
Benno Müller-Hill was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1933. He studied chemistry in Freiburg and Munich, and worked for three years as a research fellow with Walter Gilbert in the laboratory of James Watson at Harvard University. In 1966, he isolated the Lac repressor with Walter Gilbert. In 1968 he became full professor at the Genetics Institute of Cologne University. Professor Müller-Hill's main area of research is protein-DNA interaction and gene control. He has published books entitled 'The lac Operon. A Short History of a Genetic Paradigm' (1996), and 'Tödliche Wissenschaft' (1984) on the history of human genetics in Nazi Germany. The latter has been translated into English (Murderous Science, Oxford University Press, 1988) and seven other languages, and a paperback edition with an afterword by James Watson was published in 1998 (Cold Spring Harbor Press).
Vincenzo Pirrotta
Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1942, Vincenzo Pirrotta migrated with his family to Rome and then to the US. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, studying physical chemistry and molecular biology. As a Tutor at Harvard's Eliot House, he also had the privilege of interacting with some of the world's foremost luminaries in history, philosophy, biology and social sciences. Professor Pirrotta obtained a PhD with Matthew Meselson and Mark Ptashne, then returned to Europe, moving from Stockholm to Basel (where he was an Assistant Professor), to the new EMBL institute in Heidelberg, where he studied gene regulation in bacteriophage lambda and then Drosophila. From Heidelberg, he moved to Houston, Texas, at the Baylor College of Medicine, studying developmental biology, gene regulation and chromatin organization. In 1992, when he moved to the University of Geneva, he was immersed in the problems of chromatin silencing by the Polycomb proteins. Since autumn 2004, he has been at Rutgers University studying Polycomb silencing, chromatin complexes, genomics and nuclear architecture.
Wolf Reik
Wolf Reik studied Medicine at the Universities of Freiburg and Hamburg and obtained his MD from the University of Hamburg. He did his thesis work with Rudolf Jaenisch, and postdoctoral work with Azim Surani in Cambridge. In 1987, Dr Reik became a Fellow of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine at Cambridge. In 1992, he became Head of the Laboratory of Developmental Genetics, and in 1997 Head of the Developmental Genetics Programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, of which he is currently the Associate Director of Research. Dr Reik's research interests are in mammalian epigenetics and imprinting. He is a member of scientific advisory boards of international academic institutions, and has won a number of honours and prizes, including the Wellcome Prize in Physiology. He is also a member of EMBO and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Azim Surani
Azim Surani obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1975. Part of his research career involved studies of early mammalian development, and this work led to the discovery of genetic imprinting in mammals. Professor Surani has been based at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, since 1992. His recent work has been on the mechanism of specification of primordial germ cells and the epigenetic programming of the mammalian germ line. Professor Surani's research interests also include pluripotent stem cells and mechanisms of genomic reprogramming and dedifferentiation.
Robert Tjian
Robert Tjian is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Harvard (1976) working with Rich Losick on bacterial sigma factors. He was a postdoctoral researcher with Jim Watson at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory (1978), where he discovered that SV40 large T-antigen is a sequence specific transcription factor. In 1983, he developed activator-dependent in vitro transcription and DNA affinity chromatography to purify and clone human Sp1. This strategy led to the isolation of many enhancer-binding factors, including AP1, AP2 and CTF, which helped to define the modular nature of activation domains. The use of integrated and reconstituted in vitro transcription systems subsequently led to the identification of the TBP/TAF co-activators, the human CRSP/mediator complexes, PBAF chromatin remodelling assemblies, and cell-type-specific TAFs and TRFs.
Marc Vidal
Dr Vidal received his PhD from Gembloux University (Belgium) based on work that he performed at Northwestern University (USA). He identified the yeast genes SIN3 and RPD3, and demonstrated that they encode global transcriptional regulators. RPD3 was later found to encode histone deacetylase. During his post-doctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center (USA), he developed the reverse two-hybrid system, a method now used by many laboratories to genetically characterize protein-protein interactions. He started his own group in 1997, with the goal of understanding how global and local properties of macromolecular networks relate to biological processes and human diseases. In 2000, he moved his laboratory to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He is now Associate Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the DFCI Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB).
Fred Winston
Fred Winston is a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA degree from the University of Chicago and his PhD from MIT, working on phage lysogeny with Dr David Botstein. Dr Winston began studies of transcriptional control in yeast while he was a postdoctoral researcher with Dr Gerald Fink. Over the past twenty years, Dr Winston's laboratory has used yeast genetics to identify and study a large number of conserved factors that control transcription initiation and elongation in eukaryotes.
Cynthia Wolberger
Cynthia Wolberger received her bachelor's degree in physics from Cornell University. She determined the crystal structure of a 434 Cro-DNA complex as a graduate student with Drs Stephen Harrison and Mark Ptashne at Harvard University, where she received a PhD degree in biophysics. Dr Wolberger was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr Robert Stroud at UCSF and then with Dr Carl Pabo at Johns Hopkins, where she determined the structure of the MAT 2 homeodomain bound to DNA. She joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1991, where she is now Professor of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry. Dr Wolberger was a David and Lucile Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering and is an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research interests include structural studies of proteins that regulate transcription, including multiprotein complexes bound to DNA and enzymes that modify chromatin and mediate transcriptional silencing.
Jerry Workman
Jerry Workman, PhD, is an Investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri. He joined the Institute in 2003 from the Pennsylvania State University, where he was an Associate Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr Workman earned a PhD in cell and molecular biology from the University of Michigan and completed postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University and Harvard. Dr Workman pioneered the use of defined chromatin templates to dissect complex reactions that activate gene transcription, and the use of yeast as a source for purification and analysis of chromatin-modifying complexes. He has made major advances in the field of chromatin research and has shown how specific subunit interactions with different activators lead to the recruitment of chromatin remodelling complexes, modification of nucleosome arrays, and initiation of gene transcription in vitro. His research focus at the Stowers Institute is on the study of protein complexes that modify chromatin.
Carl Wu
Carl Wu is Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. He received his PhD in 1979 from Harvard University, where he discovered DNase-hypersensitive sites in Drosophila chromatin as a graduate student with Sally Elgin. As a postdoctoral fellow with Wally Gilbert (Harvard Society of Fellows 1979-1982), he introduced indirect end-labelling as a general technique for chromatin analysis, and localized DNase-hypersensitive sites to heat-shock and rat insulin gene promoters. He moved in 1982 to the Laboratory of Biochemistry, National Cancer Institute, where he began a long-term of the generation of DNase-hypersensitive sites. In 1994, his group published the first report of an ATP-dependent chromatin remodelling activity from Drosophila extracts, which led to the purification of the ISWI-containing NURF complex, a member of the SWI/SNF family. His group has further characterized the distinctive nucleosome sliding activity catalyzed by NURF, and revealed the functional importance of this enzyme for the expression of many Drosophila genes. Recently, he has provided new insights into chromatin remodelling by discovering ATP-dependent histone exchange catalyzed by the yeast SWR1 complex.
Richard Young
Richard Young is a molecular biologist whose laboratory studies genome expression and its relationship to human disease. His research group uses experimental and computational technologies to understand the transcriptional regulatory circuitry of vertebrate cells. The Young laboratory believes that knowledge of this circuitry will provide the foundation for novel therapeutic strategies against major human diseases. Dr Young received his PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and is currently a Member of the Whitehead Institute, a Professor of Biology at MIT, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He received his BS degree in Biological Sciences from Indiana University in 1975, his PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1979, and conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University.
