Research Highlights advisory panel

Papers and web sites in the Research Highlights section of Nature Reviews Genetics are chosen with the aid of the following advisors:

Michael Akam

Michael Akam participated in the cloning of the Drosophila melanogaster Hox genes at Stanford University, USA, and, after moving to Cambridge, UK, in 1982, was the first to demonstrate the spatially restricted expression of Hox genes along the anterior�posterior axis. He has since worked on many aspects of the functional organization of Hox genes in Drosophila sp. and other arthropods. He was a founder member of the Wellcome/CRC Institute in Cambridge, and in 1997 became Director of the University Museum of Zoology, where he has established a laboratory for the study of development and evolution. His particular interests include the diversity of patterning mechanisms among insects and the control of body plans by Hox genes.

Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll received his Ph.D. from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, and did his postdoctoral training with Matthew Scott at the University of Colorado, before joining the Departments of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1990 he became an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Sean Carroll's research interests are the genetics of animal development, pattern formation and morphological evolution.

Nancy J. Cox

Nancy J. Cox did her graduate research in the Deptartment of Human Genetics at Yale University, Connecticut, USA, with Ken Kidd, completing her Ph.D. in 1982. After doing postdoctoral research at Washington University, USA, in psychiatric genetics, she began working on the genetics of diabetes at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 1985. She has been at the University of Chicago, USA, since 1987, where she is Associate Professor of Human Genetics and Medicine. Her primary research interest is in unravelling the genetic component to complex phenotypes, and her computational laboratory focuses on developing and extending methods of analysis for such phenotypes, including current studies on type 2 diabetes and related phenotypes, stuttering and a variety of psychiatric disorders.

Susan Forsburg

Susan Forsburg received her A.B. from the University of California at Berkeley, USA, in molecular biology and english literature. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, for her Ph.D., where she worked on transcriptional regulation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Still travelling eastwards, Forsburg next joined Paul Nurse's laboratory at Oxford University, UK, as part of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund for her postdoctorate on cell-cycle control in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. In 1993, she returned home to California, USA, as a faculty member of the Salk Institute in La Jolla. She was recruited to the University of Southern California in 2004, where she joined the expanding programme in molecular and computational biology. Forsburg's laboratory investigates DNA replication, recombination and chromosome dynamics in fission yeast, with a particular interest in how the MCM helicase operates to maintain genome stability and influence chromatin structure.

Ralph Greenspan

Ralph Greenspan has worked on the genetic and neurobiological basis of behaviour in the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, almost since the inception of the field. He studied with one of its founders, Jeffrey Hall, at Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1979. He subsequently taught and conducted research at Princeton University and New York University where he ran the W. M. Keck Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology, moving to San Diego in 1997 to become a Senior Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute. He has conducted research on the genetics of neural development in the fruitfly and in the mouse, as well as on the genetics of courtship, learning, foraging and sleep in the fly.

Yoshihide Hayashizaki

Yoshihide Hayashizaki received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Osaka University Medical School in 1982 and 1986, respectively, and worked in Professor K. Matsubara's and Professor K. Miyai's laboratory as a fellow until 1988. From 1988 to 1992, he worked as a research scientist at the National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute in Osaka, where he developed a new technology known as the Restriction Landmark Genome Scanning (RLGS) System. In 1992, he joined the Institute of Physical and Chemical (RIKEN), and was appointed Project Director for the RIKEN Genome Project in 1995. Since then, he has been involved in establishing a Mouse Genome Encyclopedia. He is currently Project Director of Genome Exploration Research Group, Genomic Sciences Center, RIKEN, Yokohama. Here, he analyses gene transcriptional networks using the Mouse Genome Encyclopedia to develop new drugs.

Mark Jobling

Mark Jobling was trained in biochemistry and genetics at the University of Oxford, UK, where he developed an interest in human Y chromosome diversity. Since 1992, he has worked at the University of Leicester, where his group carries out research on the histories of human populations, male infertility, mutation processes in haploid DNA and the application of Y-chromosomal markers in genealogical and forensic studies, as well as the characteristics of autosomal and X-chromosomal haplotypes and their application in human population genetics. He is currently a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Genetics.

Peter Koopman

Peter Koopman received his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Melbourne in 1986, and undertook postdoctoral training with Anne McLaren at the MRC Mammalian Development Unit in London. During further work with Robin Lovell-Badge at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, he was part of the team responsible for discovering the mammalian Y-linked sex-determining gene Sry. He returned to Australia in 1992 to head a research team at the University of Queensland, to further characterize the sex-determining pathway and a family of developmental genes known as Sox.

Leonid Kruglyak

Leonid Kruglyak received his A.B. degree in physics from Princeton University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from the University of California at Berkeley, USA. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Oxford University, UK, he joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, Massachussets, USA, as a research scientist. Subsequently, he held a faculty position in the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA, where he was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an affiliate professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, USA. In 2005, he returned to Princeton University as a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Lewis–Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. He is a recipient of a James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics, and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. His research interests focus on understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes.

Barbara Meyer

Barbara Meyer is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. training with Mark Ptashne at Harvard University and her postdoctoral training with Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, before taking an initial faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include sex determination, X-chromosome dosage compensation and chromosome segregation.

John Quackenbush

John Quackenbush completed a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1990, followed by a two-year postdoctoral position in particle physics and phenomenology. Since 1992, he has worked on various aspects of genomics, including mapping, sequencing and sequence analysis. John Quackenbush is now an investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research, Maryland, USA, where his work focuses on functional and comparative genomics and bioinformatics. Current research projects include the identification of expression fingerprints and genomic alterations that are relevant to colon and breast tumour metastasis, the study of gene expression in rodent models of heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders, the investigation of gene and metabolic expression in Arabidopsis, and the integration of EST, gene and genomic sequence data to facilitate gene discovery and cross-species comparisons.

Janet Rossant

Janet Rossant is a developmental biologist with long-time interests in the mechanisms of the establishment and maintenance of the trophoblast cell lineage in mice. She is a senior scientist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, and a professor in the Departments of Molecular and Medical Genetics, and in Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Toronto, Canada. She is also a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Mark Vidal

Mark Vidal received his Ph.D. from Gembloux University, Belgium, based on work that he carried out 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 postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, USA, he developed the reverse two-hybrid system, a method that is 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).

Virginia Walbot

Virginia Walbot is Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, where her laboratory analyses the molecular and developmental regulation of MuDR/Mu transposons of maize and coordinates a maize gene-discovery genomics project that involves ten laboratories. Research in her laboratory also focuses on the activity and sequestration of anthocyanin into vacuoles, as this pigment is the primary reporter function for Mu excision from reporter genes, the impact on maize gene expression of UV-B, a natural modulator of Mu activity. Professor Walbot received a Ph.D. from Yale University for studies on RNA metabolism in bean embryos, and did postdoctoral training at the University of Georgia on the organization and expression of the cotton genome.

Detlef Weigel

Detlef Weigel received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in T�bingen, Germany, where he studied Drosophila development. After postdoctoral work at Caltech, where he began to work on the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1993. He has recently returned to the Max Planck Institute in T�bingen, where he is Director of the newly founded Department of Molecular Biology. His current research focuses on mechanisms of floral induction and early floral patterning, as well as natural genetic variation in Arabidopsis and other species.

Phillip D. Zamore

Phillip D. Zamore received his A.B. (1986) and his Ph.D. (1992) from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA, where he did graduate studies with Michael R. Green. That work fostered his passion for RNA and RNA-binding proteins. He received a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship and a Charles H. Hood Fellowship to do postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, where he studied jointly with Ruth Lehmann (to learn Drosophila genetics and developmental biology), James R. Williamson (to learn quantitative methods for the study of RNA-protein interactions) and David P. Bartel (to learn new methods for manipulating RNA). He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as a faculty member in November 1999 and is a 2000 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences and a 2002 W.M. Keck Foundation Young Scholar in Medical Research. Phillip Zamore's current research interests are in the biochemical mechanisms and biological functions of the RNA-interference (RNAi) pathway, and particularly in the intersection of RNAi and development.

Len Zon

Len Zon is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Children's Hospital and is Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry and natural sciences from Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and an M.D. degree from Jefferson Medical College. He subsequently did an internal medicine residency at New England Deaconess Hospital and a fellowship in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He did his postdoctoral research in Stuart Orkin's laboratory, where he investigated blood-specific gene transcription. As the zebrafish offers a forward genetic system for understanding vertebrate biology, the Zon lab uses zebrafish as a model system for the study of blood development and disease, and for the study of cancer.

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