Grantsmanship for Postdocs

Speakers

Organizer

Yaihara Fortis, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Keynote Speaker

Jaime S. Rubin, PhD

Columbia University

Jaime S. Rubin, PhD, received a BS in physics sigma pi sigma in 1977 from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (New York, NY). She then received the MSc and PhD degrees from the Ontario Cancer Institute/University of Toronto in 1980 and 1984, respectively. Her PhD thesis, published in the journal, Nature, described the first molecular identification and characterization of a human DNA repair gene. Since 1985, she has held a number of senior level positions at Columbia University's Medical Center, including Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs, having served as the founding Director of the Office of Graduate Affairs, and Acting Associate Vice President/Acting Associate Dean for Research Administration, having served as one of the founders of the Office of Research Administration. She is currently the Vice Chair for Investigator Development in the Department of Medicine. All of these positions have allowed for the teaching and mentoring of junior investigators, including medical, public health, nursing, and graduate students, medical and dental residents, postdoctoral fellows and scientists, and assistant professors. She founded (in 1996) and continues to direct the graduate level course "Funding and Grantsmanship for Research and Career Development Activities” and served as the Associate Program Director for the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship Program, having helped develop and initiate this successful program at Columbia in 2000. She started and continues to co-direct the Medical Center's course on "Responsible Conduct of Research and Related Policy Issues.” Other roles include serving as Associate Director for Career Development on a number of NIH-funded pre-doctoral and postdoctoral training grants as well as an advisory board member of Columbia’s Patient-Oriented Research (POR) Master of Science Program and CTSA (Education).

Moderator

Peter Hare, PhD

Associate Director, Research Mission Programs, NYU School of Medicine

Peter Hare is Associate Director of Research Mission Programs at NYU School of Medicine. His primary roles relate to editing the scientific components of grant proposals, helping faculty members to identify appropriate funding opportunities, and developing initiatives to better support the faculty and promote their visibility. Before joining NYU School of Medicine, Dr. Hare worked for Nature Publishing Group, where he was a senior editor at Nature Biotechnology and editorial lead for their Digital First program. Before that, he was a research associate at the Rockefeller University after completing his PhD at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

Panelists

Konstantinos Drosatos, PhD

Temple University

Konstantinos Drosatos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Center for Translational Medicine at Temple University School of Medicine.

During his graduate training in Boston University and the University of Crete, Greece he focused on the transcriptional regulation of Apolipoprotein E and the role of ApoE in lipoprotein clearance. He demonstrated the importance of the JNK signaling pathway in the regulation of apoE expression and created an improved ApoE molecule that treats hyperlipidemia. In addition, he discovered that miR370 targets directly carnitine palmitoyl transferase, an enzyme that regulates fatty acid oxidation. During his graduate training he published 5 original papers, 1 review article and 2 book chapters.

Dr. Drosatos did his postdoctoral training in Ira Goldberg's lab at Columbia University and focused on the effects of abnormal lipid metabolism in organ function. Specifically, he discovered that lipid accumulation ignites β-adrenergic receptor dysfunction prior to heart failure development. For this work he received the New Investigator Travel Award in the BCVS conference of the American Heart Association (AHA), as well as an AHA post-doctoral fellowship. Driven by his interest in cardiac stress signaling, he initiated a project that demonstrated the importance of cardiac fatty acid oxidation for the treatment of septic cardiac dysfunction. For this project he was funded with a K99/R00 "Pathway to Independence" Award by the NHLBI-NIH. During his post-doctoral training he published 11 original papers and 2 review articles.

In May 2014 he was recruited as a tenure-track Assistant Professor by the Dept of Pharmacology and the Center for Translational Medicine at Temple Univ. School of Medicine. His group investigates transcriptional regulation mechanisms that link cardiac stress with altered myocardial fatty acid metabolism. His long-term goal is to apply interventions that can improve cardiac function by modulating cardiac energetics. During the first year as a faculty he has published 2 original papers, 1 review article, 1 book chapter and 1 editorial in Circulation. Also, he was the recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award at the BCVS Scientific Sessions.

Dr. Drosatos has founded or served as the president of the executive board of two scientific networks of Greek biomedical scientists and physicians that live abroad: the Hellenic Bioscientific Association in the USA (~500 members) and the World Hellenic Biomedical Association (~2,000 members in 30 countries). During his tenure as the president of these societies he organized national meetings and an international summer school for medical and biosciences students. He serves as a member of the Early Career Committee of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Council of the American Heart Association. Also, he is a member of the pre-selection committee of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.

Gabrielle Fredman, PhD

Dr. Fredman received her PhD from Boston University in 2009. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. Charles Serhan at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School to study lipid mediators in the resolution of inflammation. After a brief post doc in the Serhan laboratory, Gabrielle joined the laboratory of Dr. Ira Tabas at Columbia University. Dr. Fredman is now an assistant professor at Albany Medical College in the Center for Cardiovascular Sciences. Dr. Fredman's research focuses on the molecular mechanisms underlying failed resolution in atherosclerosis, with an emphasis on pro-resolving lipid mediators and their receptors.

Robin Clugston, PhD

Columbia University Medical Center

Dr. Robin Clugston is an Associate Research Scientist in the Division of Preventive Medicine and Nutrition (Department of Medicine) at the Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Clugston received an M.Sci. (First class) in Human Anatomy from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Alberta in Canada. Dr. Clugston has published more than 20 peer reviewed manuscripts, and following 5 years of postdoctoral study at Columbia University was awarded a NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the summer of 2014, titled “Alcoholic liver disease and its association with hepatic vitamin A homeostasis”. His research program focuses on the interaction between chronic alcohol consumption and the body’s ability to utilize vitamin A, with a particular emphasis on the development