Advisors
Papers highlighted in the Milestones were chosen with the help of a panel of experts listed below.
Advisors list
- Yves Barral
- Erika Holzbaur
- Anne Ridley
- William B. Bement
- Alan F. Horwitz
- Michael Sheetz
- Michel Bornens
- Jonathon Howard
- Vic Small
- Marie-France Carlier
- Patrick J. Hussey
- James Spudich
- Don Cleveland
- Tony Hyman
- Margaret Titus
- Pierre A. Coulombe
- Robert Insall
- Kathleen Trybus
- Harold Erickson
- Jan Löwe
- Yoshimi Takai
- John E. Eriksson
- Wallace Marshall
- Ron Vale
- Gregg Gundersen
- Tim Mitchison
- Michael Way
- Nobutaka Hirokawa
- Thomas Pollard
Yves Barral
Yves Barral, born in 1966 in Mexico, received his PhD in 1994 from the University "Pierre et Marie Curie" in Paris, France for his work on G1 cyclin degradation. He is currently Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the coordination of mitotic events, during the asymmetric division of yeast cells. His main achievements have been the discovery of cell-cycle checkpoints coordinating mitotic progression with the assembly of the cytokinetic machinery and cytokinesis with chromosome segregation, and the discovery of septin-dependent diffusion barriers that control the distribution of various fate determinants between mother and bud. He also works on the coordination of actin and microtubules during spindle orientation.
William B. Bement
Bill Bement graduated from Juanita High School in Kirkland, Washington, USA received his BA in Biology from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington and his PhD in Zoology from Arizona State University, Tempe, USA, where he studied signal transduction during frog egg fertilization and oocyte wound repair in the lab of David Capco. He conducted his postdoctoral research studying unconventional myosins as well as wound healing in cultured epithelial monolayers in the lab of Mark Mooseker at Yale University, USA. In 1994, Bement was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Zoology Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, where he is now a Professor. At UW-Madison, Bement and his lab have been working to understand how microtubules and actin filaments interact during cytokinesis and other contractile processes, how the signal transduction events elicited by cellular damage lead to cytoskeletal changes involved in cellular wound healing, and how myosin-X contributes to spindle assembly and function.
Michel Bornens
Michel Bornens received his PhD at Université de Paris, France, on the isolation and biochemical analysis of the lipid composition of the nuclear envelope isolated from rat hepatocytes. During his postdoctoral training at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, he investigated the protein composition of the rat liver nuclear envelope. From 1973 to 1982, he worked at the Département de Biologie Moléculaire de l'Institut Pasteur in Paris on heparin-induced solubilization of chromatin and lectin-induced blastogenesis in rat thymocytes. Ever since, his research has mainly dealt with the role of the centrosome-microtubules network in cell polarity and cell division, first at the Centre de Génétique Moléculaire, CNRS, in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and since 1995 at UMR 144 CNRS at Institut Curie in Paris.
Marie-France Carlier
Marie-France Carlier worked, together with Dominique Pantaloni, on the molecular mechanisms responsible for the control of assembly dynamics of microtubules and actin filaments. In the early 80s, she demonstrated the role played by the hydrolysis of GTP in microtubule assembly. In collaboration with Terrell L. Hill, she showed that the existence of a GTP cap at the end of growing microtubules was responsible for the stability of the polymer at steady state, preventing the very rapid depolymerization of the GDP core. These concepts were at the origin of the dynamic instability behaviour. In collaboration with E.D. Korn, she showed the control of actin assembly dynamics by ATP hydrolysis. She analysed the function of a large number of actin regulatory proteins with the goal to understand the molecular basis of motility and validated the concept of regulated treadmilling as the support of movement by reconstituting actin-based motility from a minimum number of five pure proteins. Her present endeavor aims at analysing and reconstituting motile systems of higher complexity to understand the physical chemical basis for the coordinated dynamic behaviour of different actin arrays in a living cell.
Don Cleveland
Don Cleveland, head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the Ludwig Institute, University of California, San Diego, USA has made many contributions to the field of cytoskeleton. As a graduate student he discovered the microtubule-associated protein tau (mutations in which cause human cognitive disease). He was the first to identify the tubulin and keratin gene families, as well as the first mammalian example of control of gene expression through regulated RNA instability. He also identified components that are required for the mitotic checkpoint that insures accurate chromosome segregation. Finally, he demonstrated that an interlinked array of neurofilaments is an intrinsic determinant of axonal growth.
Pierre A. Coulombe
Pierre A. Coulombe is a Professor of Biological Chemistry and Dermatology, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA, which he joined in 1992. He obtained a PhD degree in Pharmacology from the Université de Montréal, Canada, in 1987, and then pursued postdoctoral training for 3.5 years under the tutelage of Elaine Fuchs, then at the University of Chicago. As a postdoc, Coulombe began a lifelong career of research on the properties and function of intermediate filaments. He was involved in the identification of the first intermediate filament-based disease, in defining the structural support function of keratin filaments in epithelial cells, and in defining several novel, non-mechanical functions for keratin proteins.
Harold Erickson
Harold Erickson is James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, USA. Erickson received his PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA in 1968. During his postdoctoral work with Aaron Klug at the MRC laboratory, Cambridge, UK, he developed techniques for the computer reconstruction of electron microscope images. He took a position at Duke University Medical Center in 1971. His work initially focused on the cytoskeleton, in particular the assembly of microtubules; however, he extended his interest in protein assembly to the extracellular matrix in the late 1970s, studying fibrinogen, fibronectin and tenascin. His lab was one of the first to develop electron microscopy of single protein molecules by rotary shadowing. His current research on the cytoskeleton has moved from eukaryotic cells to bacteria, with a focus on FtsZ, the bacterial homologue of tubulin, and bacterial cell division.
John E. Eriksson
John Eriksson did his post-doctoral training at Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, USA (1990-1993) and then he moved to Turku Centre for Biotechnology (University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University; 1994-1998) as a Senior Scientist. He was Professor of Zoology at University of Turku from 1999-2006, and since August 2006, he is Professor and Head of Cell Biology at Åbo Akademi University. His group has long been interested in the role of cytoskeletal intermediate filaments (IFs) as signalling targets and determinants. IFs have been established as important components for structural integrity of cells and tissues, and Eriksson's work aims especially at deciphering the recently emerging functions of IFs as scaffolds and organizers of cell and tissue-specific signalling.
Gregg Gundersen
Gregg Gundersen received his PhD degree in Biochemistry from the University of Washington in Seattle, USA where he studied sea urchin fertilization. Gundersen began his work on the cytoskeleton as a postdoctoral fellow in Chloe Bulinski's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles, USA. There he studied the role of post-translational modification of tubulin and found out that microtubule subsets were differentiated by their stability and accumulation of post-translationally modified tubulin. Gundersen became an Assistant Professor in 1988 at Columbia University, New York, USA where he is now a Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology. At Columbia, Gundersen has continued his work on the role of microtubules in cell polarity and migration and the crosstalk between microtubules and actin filaments, examining how microtubule dynamics are controlled by Rho GTPases. His recent work has expanded to consider how microtubules regulate focal adhesion dynamics in migrating cells and the role of nuclear positioning in cell polarization and migration.
Nobutaka Hirokawa
Nobutaka Hirokawa received his MD and PhD at the Medical School, University of Tokyo, Japan. After a stay for 5 years in the USA as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, and an Associate Professor in Washington University, he became a Professor and Chairman, Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, University of Tokyo in 1983. He uses electron microscopy, molecular cell biology and genetics, structural biology and biophysics to study the structure and functions of major microtubule-associated proteins and in particular, he uncovered the many of the diverse functions of the kinesin superfamily proteins. He is a Japan Academy member and EMBO Associate member. He has been on the editorial boards of Cell, Science, Neuron, Journal of Cell Biology, and EMBO journal.
Erika Holzbaur
Erika Holzbaur is a Professor of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a member of the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute, Philadelphia, USA. During her PhD she investigated the mechanochemistry of the dynein ATPase at the Pennsylvania State University, and she examined the regulation of cytoplasmic dynein and dynactin during her postdoctoral work in the lab of Richard Vallee at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, Shrewsbury, USA. She has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, focusing on the cell biology and biophysics of microtubule motor proteins, as well as the link between defects in microtubule-based motility and neurodegenerative disease.
Alan F. Horwitz
Alan F. "Rick" Horwitz is the Harrison Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Virginia, School of Medicine, Charlottesville, USA and Director of the Cell Migration Consortium. He trained in biophysics and magnetic resonance at Stanford and Berkeley universities, USA. However, his interests quickly turned to cell adhesion and cell migration. Prior to his appointment at the University of Virginia, Horwitz was a Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine, Philadelphia, USA and Head of the Department of Cell and Structural Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. His current research interests include the mechanisms and regulation of adhesion and cytoskeletal organization during migration, the mechanisms of dendritic spine morphogenesis and synapse formation in hippocampal neurons, and the development and use of quantitative imaging approaches to study these problems.
Jonathon Howard
Joe Howard has a PhD in Neurobiology from the Australian National University where he worked on optics and signal transduction in insect photoreceptors with S. Laughlin and A. Snyder. During postdoctoral work with A. J. Hudspeth at the University of California in San Francisco, USA he became interested in cellular and molecular mechanics. He measured the forces associated with the gating and adaptation of mechanosensory ion channels in the hair cells of the inner ear, and he showed that a single kinesin molecule can walk processively along a microtubule. As a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA he further developed single-molecule techniques to study the mechanism of force generation by motor proteins. His current interests concern the mechanics and dynamics of the microtubule cytoskeleton during cell division, motility and mechanotransduction.
Patrick J. Hussey
Patrick J. Hussey is the Professor of Plant Molecular Cell Biology at the University of Durham, UK. He received his PhD in Biology from the University of Kent at Canterbury in association with the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. After postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota, USA and the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK he took up a lectureship in Royal Holloway University of London, UK where he was awarded a Personal Chair in 1999. He moved to the University of Durham in 2000. His main interest is in the structure, function and regulation of the plant cytoskeleton in cell morphogenesis and plant development and the potential role of the cytoskeleton in biotechnology.
Tony Hyman
Tony Hyman is a founder and director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Dresden, Germany. He received his PhD in 1988 from King's College Cambridge, UK, and performed his postdoctoral work at University of California San Francisco, USA. His primary research interests are the mechanisms of asymmetric cell division and mitosis. He was awarded the EMBO gold medal in 2002 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2007.
Robert Insall
Robert Insall did a PhD in Developmental Biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, with Rob Kay. During this time, he got interested in the details of chemotaxis, so he went to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, USA to do postdoctoral research with Peter Devreotes. He returned to the UK as a Wellcome Career Development fellow at University College London, followed by an MRC Senior Fellowship in Birmingham, UK. He is now a group leader at the Beatson Institute, Glasgow, UK. His laboratory works on absolutely anything to do with cell movement or (particularly) chemotaxis. His favourite organism is Dictyostelium, but he has worked on amoebic dysentery, patient neutrophils, mouse embryonic fibroblasts, and weird amoebas like Acrasis. He is currently trying to study the motility of tumour cells.
Jan Löwe
Jan Löwe focuses on the bacterial cytoskeleton and its roles in bacterial cell division and DNA segregation and his group was involved in the identification and characterization of key bacterial cytoskeletal proteins. Using modern structural approaches such as cellular electron microscopy, current work aims to provide atomic-level understanding of the cytoskeleton, bridging the resolution gap between protein crystallography and fluorescent light microscopy. Jan Löwe is group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. He won the EMBO Gold Medal in 2007 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, London.
Wallace Marshall
Wallace Marshall is an electrical engineer by training. He did his PhD with John Sedat at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), USA and his postdoctoral work with Joel Rosenbaum at Yale, USA. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at UCSF, where his lab studies how cells solve engineering problems, particularly how cells control the size, number, and position of organelles. These studies are conducted using a combination of experimental and computational approaches as well as a range of model systems including the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.
Tim Mitchison
Tim Mitchison completed his PhD at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), California, USA under the supervision of Marc Kirschner working on the dynamic instability of microtubules. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London, UK before returning to San Francisco to become an Assistant Professor at UCSF. He then moved to Harvard University, Boston, USA to become co-director of the Institute for Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1997. He recently became deputy chair of the Department of Systems Biology. His lab is interested in the structure, dynamics, and function of the cytoskeleton.
Thomas Pollard
Thomas D. Pollard graduated from Pomona College and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, where he began research on the molecular basis of cellular movements with Sus Ito. As a postdoctoral fellow with Ed Korn at National Institutes of Health (NIH), he discovered the first unconventional myosin, myosin-I. While at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, USA), Salk Institute (San Diego, USA) and now at Yale, USA, his research group has focused on the molecular basis of cellular motility and cytokinesis. His research group combined microscopy, biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology to provide the quantitative evidence required to formulate and test a detailed molecular explanation for how the assembly of actin filaments stimulated by actin-related protein-2/3 (ARP2/3) complex produces cellular movements. His group is using the same approaches along with genetics and mathematical modelling to learn how cells divide in two during cytokinesis at the end of the cell cycle.
Anne Ridley
Anne Ridley studied Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK and then carried out her PhD research in London, UK, studying the role of Ras in cell transformation. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Cambridge, USA and then in London, investigating the functions of Rho and Rac proteins. She is now a laboratory leader at King's College London, studying the molecular basis for eukaryotic cell migration, concentrating on intracellular signalling processes that involve the Rho family of GTPases.
Michael Sheetz
Michael Sheetz is Professor and Chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, New York, USA. His graduate training was in physical chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA and he has a long-term interest in the physical aspects of cell motility. Earlier studies involved bilayer couple effects on cell shape, myosin in vitro motility assays, and kinesin. Currently, his laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of force and geometry sensing that are related to the rigidity response. Other important foci of his laboratory are membrane-cytoskeleton interactions and their dynamics; and the mechanism of force generation by bacterial pilus retraction.
Vic Small
After obtaining a PhD in Department of Biophysics, King's College, London, UK and research training in electron microscopy, Vic Small worked on the structure and regulation of smooth muscle, first at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and then at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Salzburg, Austria and Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Through a contribution to the cytoskeleton explosion in the 1970s his interests turned, in addition, to the mechanism of cell migration. Since then he has focused on using live cell microscopy in combination with electron microscopy to delve into the secrets of how cells use the cytoskeleton in movement and guidance.
James Spudich
James Spudich, Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Disease, has a primary appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and a joint appointment in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, USA. He received his PhD in biochemistry from Stanford in 1968 and he did postdoctoral work in genetics at Stanford and in structural biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. From 1971 to 1977 he was Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco. In 1977, he was appointed Professor in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford University. He served as Chairman of the Department of Structural Biology from 1979-1984. Since 1992, he has been Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, and served as Chairman from 1994-1998. He has held a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology since 1989. From 1998 to 2002, he was Co-Founder and first Director of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Program in Bioengineering, Biomedicine and Biosciences called Bio-X. At present he is also an Adjunct Professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India. Spudich has served the scientific community in many ways, including as President of the American Society for Cell Biology, as a member of national and international scientific advisory boards, and for many years as a member of the Research Council of the National American Heart Association. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Margaret Titus
Margaret Titus is a Professor of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. She received a PhD from Brandeis University, Waltham, USA and conducted postdoctoral studies at Stanford University, USA. The Titus laboratory studies the cellular roles of unconventional myosin superfamily members.
Kathleen Trybus
Kathleen Trybus is a Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Vermont, Burlington, USA. Before coming to Vermont in 1998, she spent 17 years at Brandeis University, Waltham, USA. Her current research focuses on the molecular mechanism of class V myosins, motors that are essential for organelle transport and mRNA localization. She uses approaches such as single-molecule assays, as well as biochemical and structural techniques. Another major focus of her research has been the mechanism of regulation of smooth muscle myosin by light chain phosphorylation.
Yoshimi Takai
Yoshimi Takai obtained a MD (1974) and a PhD (1980) from Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. He began his research career with the discovery and characterization of protein kinase C. He then established the molecular mechanisms of small G proteins including Rab and Rho family members. He became a full professor at Kobe University in 1984, and then moved to Osaka University, Suita, Japan, in 1993. He moved again to Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine in 2008 and is now the Dean of the Graduate School of Medicine. He is interested in understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell adhesion, movement, proliferation, and polarity, particularly focusing on an emerging cell-cell adhesion molecule nectin and its structurally related molecule nectin-like protein.
Ron Vale
Ron Vale is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor and Chair of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he has been on faculty since 1987. Vale received his PhD degree in neuroscience from Stanford University. His graduate and postdoctoral studies at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Masachussetts, USA) led to the discovery of the kinesin motor. In addition to studying motor proteins, Vale's laboratory uses RNA interference and high resolution microscopy to study mitosis and cell shape, examines signal transduction by single molecule microscopy, and investigates the biochemistry and cell biology of microtubule severing and plus-end-binding proteins. Vale co-founded Cytokinetics, Inc. and 100X Imaging, Inc. and is directing several educational projects, including the Physiology Course, Woods Hole and the iBioSeminars series for the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Michael Way
Michael Way is a principal scientist at the Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute. He did his PhD and first postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK before moving to Cambridge, MA, USA for a second postdoc at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. Michael Way started his own independent research group in 1995 in the Cell Biology Programme at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. He returned to the UK in 2001 to head the Cell Motility group at the London Research Institute. The work of his group is focused on dissecting how intracellular pathogens, such as vaccinia virus, take advantage of their host to understand how signalling networks and the underlying machinery regulate cell motility and adhesion. He is an editor for the Journal of Cell Science and serves on the editorial boards of Cellular Microbiology and Cell Host and Microbe. He was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2006.
