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Contact Information:
phone: (303) 724-4600
fax: (303) 724 -2920
jodi.cropper@ucdenver.edu

About  2009 Schedule  Abstracts/Registration  Featured Speakers  Breakout Sessions  Career Panel  Sunday Activities  Travel/Lodging  Travel Awards  F.A.Q.  Keystone Resort Maps  Contact  Sponsors  2010 Conference

We are pleased to announce that Karl Deisseroth, M.D. Ph.D., Katherine High, M.D., Jeannie Lee, M.D. Ph.D., Phillip Sharp, Ph.D., and Ralph Steinman, M.D. will speak at the 2009 MD/PhD Student Conference.

 

Karl Deisseroth, M.D. Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford University. He received his A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College and M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University. He completed residency in psychiatry at Stanford. Dr. Deisseroth is an outstanding young investigator with many laurels, including a 2008 Keck Foundation Medical Research Award.

 

The Deisseroth lab has developed optical and stem cell-based neuroengineering technologies for non-invasive imaging and control of brain circuits, as they operate within living intact tissue, in real time. With these tools they are probing neural circuit dynamics with millisecond temporal resolution. Their hope is that this work will develop fundamental new conceptualizations of neurological and psychiatric disorders, basic neuroscience and bioengineering insights, and potent, specific circuit-modulation interventions for treatment of disease. The Deisseroth lab utilizes a wide range of techniques including neural stem cell and tissue engineering methods, electrophysiology, molecular biology, neural activity imaging, animal behavior, and computational neural network modeling. Dr. Deisseroth is also a physician in the psychiatry department, where he employs novel interventional high-speed, action potential-based brain stimulation techniques in human patients for therapeutic purposes.

 

 

Katherine High, M.D. is Director of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, William H. Bennett Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, and an HHMI Investigator. She received her A.B. in Chemistry from Harvard College and attended the University of North Carolina for medical school and residency. She completed a fellowship in hematology at Yale University.

 

Dr. High focuses on gene therapy for hemophilia B, in which patients at risk of spontaneous, life-threatening bleeding receive chronic infusions to mediate factor IX deficiency. Dr. High has demonstrated proof of principle that gene therapy can be effective in treating dogs with hemophilia B and has begun testing her approach in patients with promising results. She is exploring ways to optimize gene expression, confronting issues of immune-mediated repression of the adenovirus vectors expressing factor IX, and assessing safety issues in gene therapy, such as germline transmission of vectors. High's other research interests include structure-function analysis of Factors VII, IX and X through the study of recombinant and naturally occurring mutant proteins. She is also investigating the regulation of liver-specific expression of vitamin K-dependent clotting factors.

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Jeannie Lee, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Genetics and Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Molecular Biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and HHMI Investigator. She received her A.B. in biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard College and M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed residency training and served as chief resident in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

 

After an initial interest in epigentic control of gene expression as an undergraduate, Lee studied maternal imprinting underlying Fragile X Syndrome as a graduate student. As an independent investigator, Dr. Lee focuses on mechanisms of X chromosomal inactivation (XCI) that is used to achieve dosage compensation between males and females. XCI can occur through a random mechanism in which either the maternal or paternal X chromosome can be inactivated or an imprinted mechanism whereby the paternal X is always inactivated. Dr. Lee is interested in how both mechanisms are regulated and in the evolutionary connection between XCI and autosomal imprinting. Her work demonstrates that a master switch region associated with non-coding RNA is responsible for inactivation of both the X chromosome and autosomes. She is interested in how these non-coding RNAs participate in a regulatory network at the chromatin and RNA levels to affect chromosome-wide silencing.

Phillip Sharp, Ph.D. is Institute Professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his B.A. in chemistry and mathematics at Union College, his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana, and postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology and Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery regarding discontinuous gene structure.

 

The Sharp lab studies mechanisms of RNA interference (RNAi) by short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and translational repression by endogenous microRNAs (miRNAs). His lab has observed that mRNAs silenced by partially complementary siRNAs in mammalian cells are associated with polysomes that appear to be actively engaged in elongation, which conflicts with reports that siRNAs work primarily by mRNA degradation. In addition, studies from his lab relate miRNA silencing to the activities of P bodies, sites of mRNA degradation in cells. Current investigation focuses on the role of stress granules in gene regulation by miRNAs. Dr. Sharp is also studying miRNA patterning during embryonic stem cell differentiation and sequence requirements for splicing of the CD44 mRNA, which is altered following prolonged Ras activation in some tumor cells.

Ralph Steinman, M.D. is Henry G. Kunkel Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at the Rockefeller University. He received his undergraduate education at McGill University and M.D. from Harvard University. Later he completed residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral fellowship at the Rockefeller University. He received the 2007 Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research for his co-discovery of dendritic cells (DCs).

 

Dr. Steinman's research focuses on the mechanisms employed by DCs to regulate lymphocyte function in tolerance and resistance, as well as the use of DCs to understand the development of immune-based diseases and the design of new therapies and vaccines. The Steinman lab is linking the maturation of DCs with the uptake and processing of antigens and using new methods to selectively target microbial, self and tumor antigens to DCs in various maturational states in the context of different diseases, including HIV-1 and autoimmune diabetes. In addition, his group is currently investigating active suppressor or regulatory T cell mechanisms that allow DCs to induce tolerance.