Growth Networks: Systems Biology Meets Developmental Biology

Speakers

Angela DePace, PhD

Harvard Medical School
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Angela DePace received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco in 2002, where she worked with Jonathan Weissman on the molecular mechanism of yeast prion propagation. By measuring the growth of individual prion fibers she was able to demonstrate that a single protein can fold into multiple pathogenic conformations, each giving rise to different phenotypes, providing powerful evidence for the protein-only hypothesis. As a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow, she worked with Michael Eisen at UC, Berkeley, and as part of the Berkeley Drosophila Transcription Network Project to apply 2-photon microscopy and image processing techniques to characterize the transcriptional network directing embryonic development of multiple species of Drosophila. She started her own lab in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in April 2008, where her group is broadly interested in the molecular mechanisms of gene regulation and how they shape evolution of regulatory networks.

Stanislav Y. Shvartsman, PhD

Princeton University
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Stanislav Shvartsman was born in Odessa (Ukraine) and received his undergraduate degree in physical chemistry from the Moscow State University in Russia. His graduate degrees are in chemical engineering from Technion and Princeton. After postdoctoral work at MIT, he opened his laboratory at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton. The Shvartsman lab combines genetic, imaging, and computational approaches to study pattern formation and morphogenesis. The model system is Drosophila development and the main emphasis is on the direct connection between experiment and theory.

Antonio Iavarone, MD

Columbia University Medical Center
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Antonio Iavarone is an associate professor at the Institute for Cancer Genetics and the Departments of Neurology and Pathology of Columbia University Medical Center, New York. He received an MD degree and Pediatric Residency from the Catholic University of Rome. He was a research fellow at the University of California at San Francisco and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. In 1998, he joined the Faculty of Neurology and Developmental and Molecular Biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. He assumed his current position in 2002. His research has focused on delineating the role of Id2 and the retinoblastoma tumor-suppressor protein in development and pediatric cancer of the nervous system. His lab is collaborating with Andrea Califano's group at Columbia University on the identification of master regulatory factors in neural development and brain tumors.

Don Monroe

Don Monroe is a science writer based in Murray Hill, New Jersey. After getting a PhD in physics from MIT, he spent more than fifteen years doing research in physics and electronics technology at Bell Labs. He writes on physics, technology, and biology.