Retreat 2009

9:00 am

Graduate Student Speakers:

Molly Bush – Oegema Lab
Molecular Mechanisms of Centriole Assembly

Ohn Chow – Glass & Nizet Labs
The effect of statins on innate immune clearance of bacteria

Dan Clark – Mellon Lab
Effects on fertility of tissue-specific inactivation of the circadian clock

Ali Torkamani – Schork Lab
Pathway Level Selection in Human Populations

Coffee Break

Faculty Lecturer:
Yishi Jin, Ph.D., Professor of Biology & Cellular and Molecular Medicine
"Genetic studies of synapse formation and axon regeneration in C. elegans"

Morning Keynote Address:
Lawrence S.B. Goldstein, Ph.D.
"Using genetics and stem cells to probe mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease"

Dr. Goldstein is studying key genetic clues that come from a rare familiar form of Alzheimer’s disease, which suggest that early defects in the physical transport system responsible for long-distance movements of information in neurons can cause neuronal dysfunction. This failure in neurons is predicted to initiate a series of events that results in the classic plaques and tangles that characterize the disease. Larry’s lab is developing stem cells to make human neuronal models of hereditary Alzheimer’s disease, in order to test hypotheses about the cause of the disease and test new drugs for its treatment.

Distinguished Faculty Lecture:
Daniel L. Lindsley, Ph.D.
"The early development of chromosome cytology in Drosophila melanogaster"

"Dan Lindsley has been a leading figure in Drosophila genetics and biology for nearly sixty years. His early work on the behavior of chromosome aberrations provided key insights into the effects of heterochromatin on chromosome structure and function. His work with Larry Sandler on the role of gene dosage in the fly genome presaged modern genomic approaches to gene function. Similarly, their isolation of meiotic mutants paved the way for elucidating the genetic basis of exchange and segregation. In these studies Dan established a tradition of elegant and thorough genetic analysis. Dan is perhaps most widely known for the two “red books” (Lindsley and Grell, and Lindsley and Zimm). These hardback precursors to Flybase served the needs of generations of Drosophila workers on a daily basis. His many honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences."
– from Conversations in Genetics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. more

Box Lunch and Poster Session, CMG Lobby

Faculty Lecturers:

Tracy Johnson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biology
Pre-messenger RNA processing and chromatin modification: A "tail" of two histones

Trey Ideker, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine & Bioengineering
New Opportunities and Challenges in Protein Network Biology

Coffee Break

Afternoon Keynote Address:
Edward M. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D.
"Sequence based decoding of human and microbial genomes"

Internationally recognized geneticist, Eddy Rubin has served since 2002 as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and Director of the Genomics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). With more than 200 peer-reviewed publications—over 30 in the leading journals Science and Nature, his research focuses on the development of computational and biological approaches for studying genomes.