Genome Integrity Discussion Group December 2015

Speakers

Organizers

Lorraine Symington, PhD

Columbia University Medical Center

Scott Keeney, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Susan Smith, PhD

NYU Langone Medical Center

Caitlin McOmish, PhD

The New York Academy of Science

Sonya Dougal, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Speakers

Jean Gautier, PhD

Columbia University Medical Center

Olga A. Guryanova, MD, PhD

Weill Cornell Medical College

Despite significant advances in personalized medicine and targeted cancer therapies, most cancer treatments ultimately fail due to the development of therapeutic resistance.  Olga Guryanova aims to understand the molecular basis of drug resistance in cancer using molecular and cell biology approaches combined with genetic mouse modeling.  After graduating from Moscow State University School of Medicine, Olga trained at the Cleveland Clinic, where she identified novel signaling nodes maintaining cancer stem cell properties in aggressive brain tumors.  She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Ross Levine, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she is studying novel mutations in epigenetic modifier genes and their role in altered chromatin dynamics and suboptimal response to chemotherapy in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).  Olga’s career goal is to lead a research group in the field of stem cell biology of hematologic malignancies, continuing her focus on mechanistic and translational aspects of cancer research.

Jaspreet S. Khurana, PhD

Princeton University

After finishing up her Masters in Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, Dr. Khurana applied for PhD programs in the US and chose to start graduate studies at University of Massachusetts medical school, Worcester MA in 2004. For her thesis project, Dr. Khurana decided to study the role of a class of small non-coding RNAs called piRNAs in germline development and genome evolution in Drosophila melanogaster. After completing her PhD in 2010, Dr. Khurana joined Princeton University as a postdoc with Laura Landweber. As a postdoc, she studied non-coding RNAs in programmed genome rearrangements in the ciliate, Oxytricha trifallax. Currently, Dr. Khurana is employed as an Associate Research Scientist with Laura Landweber at Columbia University, where she continues to research the same projects as before.

Hannah Klein, PhD

NYU Langone Medical Center

Dr. Kelin did undergraduate training at Cornell University, where she was first exposed to yeast genetics in the lab of Gerry Fink. She continued working with yeast for her PhD in the Department of Genetics, University of Washington, in the lab of Breck Byers.  There she used the EM to examine structures in meiotic DNA.  She also studied repetitive DNA in the EM, discovering the inverted repeat in 2 micron DNA, and classes of repeats in genomic DNA that turned out to be the Ty elements and the associated delta LTR sequences.  From there she went to Princeton University, to do a postdoc in the Department of Biochemistry with Arnold Levine, focusing on purification and study of an adenovirus DNA binding protein.  She then did a second postdoc with Tom Petes at The University of Chicago, returning to yeast and starting her studies on homologous recombination in yeast.  From there Dr. Kelin joined the Department of Biochemistry at New York University School of Medicine, continuing studies on recombination and repair in yeast.

Neal Lue, MD, PhD

Weill-Cornell Medical College

Neal F. Lue is Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine and a member of the Meyer Cancer Center. He received his BS from Johns Hopkins University and his MD and PhD from Stanford University. Dr. Lue’s research focus is to understand the mechanisms of telomere maintenance and protection. His lab has utilized a variety of standard and unorthodox model systems (including e.g., Saccharmyces cerevisiae, Candida glabrata and more recently, Ustilago maydis) to investigate the fundamental protein-nucleic acid and protein-protein interactions that govern the assembly of the telomere nucleoprotein complex and the synthesis of telomeric DNA.  Two notable recent findings are: (1) the discovery of an evolutionarily conserved Stn1-Pol12 interaction that promotes telomere C-strand synthesis by primase-pol α, and (2) the characterization of a recombination-based telomere maintenance mechanism in U. maydis that closely mimic the ALT pathway in human cancers.

Dirk Remus, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Dr. Remus received an undergraduate degree (Diploma) from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1999. From 1999 to 2003 he performed his Ph.D. studies in Prof. Mike Botchan’s lab at UC Berkeley on the biochemical characterization of the Drosophila melanogaster origin recognition complex (ORC). In 2005 he moved to London/UK as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. John Diffley at Clare Hall Laboratories (Cancer Resarch UK, London Research Institute), focusing on the biochemical reconstitution and characterization of the Mcm2-7 loading reaction in the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Since 2010 Dr. Reumus has been an Assistant Member in the Molecular Biology program at Sloan-Kettering Institute, where his lab pursues the biochemical and structural characterization of the eukaryotic DNA replication mechanism, using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model.