David Baker, Ph.D. University of Washington, Seattle
David Baker is the director of the Institute for Protein Design, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis Endowed Professor in Biochemistry, and an adjunct professor of genome sciences, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science, and physics at the University of Washington. His research group is focused on the design of macromolecular structures and functions.
He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry with Randy Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral work in biophysics with David Agard at UCSF.
When technology is properly created and applied it can be of tremendous benefit to people with disabilities. People with disabilities along with their allies know better than any other how being involved in the planning from day one is critical to a successfully accessible product, regardless of how many years in the future it lies. Dr. Cooper will present on technologies and research that he and members of the team at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories are working on ranging from Apps, cushions, homes, robots, and wheelchairs. Dr.
Gerard Karsenty M.D., Ph.D. Columbia University Medical Center
For the longest time a bone-centric view has dominated bone biology. This has been extremely fertile for our understanding of basic bone cell biology and its control by various hormones. However, if one takes into account a fundamental cell biological feature of bone and clinical observation, then it becomes obvious that the skeleton may regulate several physiological processes outside the skeleton. The lecture will review the observations that demonstrate the validity of this view broader view of bone biology.
The arms race between bacteria and phages led to the development of sophisticated anti-phage defense systems, including CRISPR-Cas and restriction systems. We recently discovered that the microbial pan-genome contains many new defense systems whose function was so far unexplored. The talk will describe the mechanisms of action of recently discovered new anti-phage systems. Surprisingly, our studies show that bacterial defense from phage gave rise to important components in the eukaryotic immune system.
Kevan Shokat is a chemist who discovers drugs against some of the most common drivers of human cancers. He is best known for targeting a mutation that drives more than 1 in 10 lung cancers, opening up a new arena of cancer treatment discovery. The target, K-Ras, is the most common driver of cancer, and was considered “undruggable” by most cancer researchers after 40 years of failed attempts to block its function. Dr. Shokat’s discovery of a K-Ras blocker broke through this decades-old barrier and threw open the doors to a new class of cancer treatments.
Ardem Patapoutian is an Armenian-American molecular biologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize laureate. He is known for his work in characterizing the PIEZO1, PIEZO2, and TRPM8 receptors that detect pressure, menthol, and temperature. Patapoutian is a neuroscience professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with David Julius.
Inflammasomes are supramolecular complexes that activate inflammatory caspases (1/4/5/11), which in turn cleavage a pore forming protein GSDMD to induces pyroptosis, a lytic cell death involving spillage of cellular contents, and to mediate secretion of IL-1 family cytokines. In this talk, I will focus on 1) the assembly and trafficking of inflammasomes required for their activation, and 2) assembly and selectivity of the GSDMD pore, with substantial unpublished data.
Morphogen gradients are a key cell specification mechanism in tissue patterning. How morphogen gradients form and are regulated across space and time is fundamental to proper tissue patterning, yet has been little studied. We investigate BMP morphogen signaling in its conserved role patterning the dorsoventral embryonic axis of vertebrates and invertebrates.
This page was last updated on Friday, February 10, 2023
