CSCI Faculty Recruitment Symposium January 22
The Columbia Stem Cell Initiative hosts the second of two faculty recruitment symposiums for the position of Assistant Professor. Faculty and trainees are invited to join, no RSVP required.
Wednesday, January 22
Hammer Health Sciences Room 401
12:00pm Stephanie Ellis, PhD - Rockefeller University
“Fighting to build a wall: how cell competition shapes the growing epidermis”
From the laboratory of Elaine Fuchs at The Rockefeller University. She is a recipient of the K99/R00 award. Her research interests probe the dynamics of tissue assembly to understand tissue fitness surveillance mechanisms at play in development and in human disease. Her goal is to probe the mechanisms of cell competition in skin progenitor cells during development, regeneration and disease.
1:00pm Joel Blanchard, PhD - The Picower Institute at MIT
“Reconstruction of the human brain in a dish to understand and reverse genetic susceptibility to neurodegeneration”
From the laboratory of Dr. Li-Huei Tsai in the Picower Institute (MIT). He is a stem cell biologist with a background in neurological disease-modeling and bioengineering. Joel is co-PI on a large UG3/UH3 grant aimed at deploying an in vitro human Neuro-Immune-Vascular brain tissue platform that he developed using iPSCs to investigate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis, screen for promising new drugs, and optimize and stratify therapeutics for AD and related cognitive impairments.
2:00pm Bruno Di Stefano, PhD - Massachusetts General Hospital
“Dissecting mechanisms that govern cellular plasticity”
From the laboratory of Dr. Konrad Hochedlinger at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. His research is aimed at clarifying the posttranscriptional and epigenetic mechanisms that govern cellular plasticity, and investigate whether they can be therapeutically exploited. His goals are 1) to determine the functional role of P-bodies in cell fate in vivo, 2) assess the role of key post-transcriptional regulators across diverse developmental contexts, and 3) dissect the post-translational mechanisms safeguarding pluripotent stem cell identity.
3:15pm Shengda Lin, PhD - Stanford University School of Medicine
“Telomerase-expressing cells in liver regeneration and tumorigenesis”
From the laboratory of Dr. Steve Artandi at Stanford University. His research integrates molecular genetics, and computational biology to investigate the roles of telomerase-expressing stem/progenitor cells in the liver addressing three main questions: 1) stem cells homeostasis in liver development, aging, and regeneration; 2) role of telomerase in clonal heterogeneity, and 3) stem/progenitor origin of liver cancers.
4:15pm Kara McKinley, PhD - University of California San Francisco
“Watching organs work: patterning principles of mammalian tissues”
From the laboratory of Dr. Ron Vale at UCSF. She is a recipient of a K99/R00 award and is co-mentored by Dr. Ophir Klein. Her goal is to take a cell biological approach to understand regeneration in mammalian organs, using real-time approaches and organoid models to understand dynamic cell specializations during tissue partnering in small intestine and human endometrium (uterine lining).