Regulation of gene expression from a distance: exploring mechanisms

• Professor Wendy Bickmore, University of Edinburgh, UK

Biography

Wendy Bickmoreis theHead of the Chromosomes and Gene Expression Section at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, MRC IGMM at the University of Edinburgh. Her scientific work is based on the principle being that genes do not function in isolation from their chromosomal and nuclear context. She has pioneered research into the spatial and temporal organisation of the human and mouse genomes, and the implications of this for gene regulation and genome function. Her experimental approaches combine cell biology with genomics, genetics and biochemistry. Wendy is an EMBO member, and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

• Professor Veronica Van Heyningen FRS, University of Edinburgh, UK

Biography

Veronica van Heyningen, formerly Head of the Medical and Developmental Genetics Section, is a Group Leader at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, MRC IGMM at the University of Edinburgh.  The group’s work with human developmental disease brought insight into the mechanisms of cis-regulatory control, revealing the long control regions flanking many developmental regulator genes.  Studies of extra-genic chromosomal rearrangements and non-coding region mutations prompted work, in mouse and zebrafish model systems, on enhancer interactions and transcription factor binding specificity.  Genome-wide target predictions for PAX6 have revealed network complexity and the precision of target-sequence specificity.  Veronica was appointed a CBE for services to science, is an EMBO Member and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the Royal Society.

• Professor Denis Duboule, University of Geneva and EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland

Biography

Denis Duboule earned his PhD in Biology in 1984. He is currently Professor of Developmental genetics and genomics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and Chairman of the department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2001, he is also the director of the Swiss national research centre ‘Frontiers in Genetics’. Duboule has a longstanding interest in the function and regulation of Hox genes, a family of genes responsible for the organization and evolution of animal body plans. These genes have been a paradigm to understand embryonic patterning, in developmental, evolutionary and pathological contexts. He is an elected member of several academies and has received many awards, amongst which the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1998. He has four children, bikes a Look KX and plays a Gibson 355 SV stereo.

• Professor Wouter de Laat, Hubrecht Institute, The Netherlands

Biography

Wouter de Laat studied biology at the Utrecht University Utrecht. During his PhD (1998) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (Prof. Jan Hoeijmakers) he investigated the molecular mechanism of nucleotide excision repair. He identified one of the nucleases and characterized the interplay between repair factors at the site of the lesion. As a postdoc, he joined the group of Prof. Frank Grosveld to work on beta-globin gene activation. In 2000 he received a career grant (Vidi) to work on long-range gene activation. His group used 3C technology, and later developed 4C technology, to demonstrate chromatin loops between genes and enhancers and to uncover long-range DNA contacts within and between chromosomes. In 2008 he received an ERC Young Investigator Grant. In September 2008 de Laat moved his group to the Hubrecht Institute, where he continued his work on genome structure and function. In January 2009 he was appointed professor in Biomedical Genomics at the University Medical Center Utrecht.

• Dr Panos Deloukas, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK

Biography

Panos Deloukas is Senior Group Leader ‘Genetics of Complex Traits in Humans’, department of Human Genetics, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.  He is Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology and honorary member of the TwinsUnit at KCL, UK. He obtained his BSc in chemistry from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1986), his MSc in microbiology from the University ParisVII, France (1987) and his PhD in molecular biology from the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland (1992).  He worked as post-doctoral fellow at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland and joined the Sanger Centre in 1994.

He led the sequencing of chromosomes 10 and 20 in the Human Genome Project. He went on to study common sequence variation (HapMap project) and since 2005 is investigating the molecular basis of common disease and variable response to drugs focusing on coronary artery disease. He has been a founder member of the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium and co-Chair of the Immunochip and the CardiogramPlus consortia; is member of several global consortia (GIANT, GLGC, IBPC-GWAS, IWPC). He has authored and co-authored more than 220 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Dr Eileen Furlong, EMBL, Germany

Biography

Eileen Furlong received her PhD at University College Dublin, Ireland and did her post-doctoral research at Stanford University, California.  She has been at group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) since Oct 2002.  Since January 2009 she is a senior scientist and joint chair of the Genome Biology department at EMBL, Heidelberg.  

Her work has been instrumental in developing and applying genomic approaches to multicellular developing embryos.  This includes developing an automated transgenic embryo sorter, tiling arrays and protocols for ChIP-chip experiments and a new method to study cell-type specific changes in regulatory state during metazoan development. 

Her group’s research interests focus on understanding how transcriptional networks drive developmental progression using Drosophila mesoderm specification as a model system. For this purpose, the group combines genomic, genetic and bioinformatics approaches to uncover basic principles of transcription and to gain predictive insights into cell fate decisions.

• Dr Anne Ferguson-Smith, University of Cambridge, UK

Biography not yet available

• Professor Mike Levine, University of California Berkeley, USA

Biography not yet available

• Dr Sarah Teichmann, LMB, UK

Biography

Sarah Teichmann obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry in 1996 from Cambridge University, and a PhD degree in Computational Genomics in 1999 working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. She was a Beit postdoctoral fellow from 2000-2001 at University College London. Since October 2001 she has been a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She studies the evolution and assembly of protein complexes, and the dynamics of transcriptional regulatory networks. Her group aims to tackle these questions through integrated computational and experimental systems biology approaches. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including EMBO Young Investigator (2003), Lister Research Prize (2010), Colworth Medal (2010) and Royal Society Crick Lecture (2012).

• Dr Jonathan Chubb, University of Dundee, UK

Biography not yet available

• Dr Marian Walhout, Umass Medical School, USA

Biography not yet available

• Professor Johann Elf, Uppsala University, Sweden

Biography not yet available

• Dr Roee Amit, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Biography

Dr Amit received his undergraduate degree in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1994. After a short a stint in the IDF, he carried out his graduate studies on the interactions of proteins and DNA at the single molecule level in the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Professor Joel Stavans, completing his PhD in 2004. In 2006, he moved to Caltech, where he specialized in Synthetic Biology working as a post-doctoral scholar in collaboration with Professor Scott Fraser, Frances Arnold, and Rob Phillips. In 2011, Dr Amit returned to Israel with a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) appointment to start the Technion's first Synthetic Biology research lab. Dr Amit's group is focused on constructing "Synthetic Enhancer Circuits" for a variety of applications and research objectives. The group's primary purpose is to decipher basic enhancer design principles using a variety of microscopy, molecular engineering, and theoretical approaches, including new synthetic biology tools developed in the lab.

• Dr Martha L Bulyk, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA

Biography

Dr Bulyk received dual undergraduate degrees in Biology and in Mathematics from MIT in 1993. She received her PhD in Biophysics in 2001 from Harvard University, where she worked in Dr George Church’s group and pursued research on transcription factors and their DNA binding sites.  Shortly thereafter, she began as an Assistant Professor at Harvard. Currently she is Associate Professor in the Division of Genetics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Pathology at Brigham & Women's Hospital, is an Associate Member of the Broad [pronunciation: \brōd\] Institute of MIT and Harvard, and is an Associate Member of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Systems Biology.

In 2005 Dr Bulyk was named one of the TR35, MIT Technology Review’s annual competition to select the top 35 young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2007 she was named in Genome Technology’s annual selection of “Tomorrow’s PIs”. Dr Bulyk has published over 60 papers, and her group is currently focused on studies of transcription factors and DNA regulatory elements, using a variety of experimental and computational approaches, including new technologies they have developed.

• Dr Gordon Hager, National Cancer Institute, NIH, USA

Biography

Dr Hager received his PhD in genetics at the University of Washington in the lab of Ben Hall. He pursued postdoctoral studies with Dick Epstein at the Institut de Biologie Moleculaire in Geneva and with Dr William Rutter at the University of California-San Francisco. He carried out the first molecular cloning of retroviruses at the NIH and described the first identification of steroid responsive regulatory elements.  He also was first to introduce the concept of chromatin modification as an important component of nuclear receptor action.  In 2000, Dr. Hager reported the first observation of transcription factor binding to specific regulatory elements in living cells, and discovered the phenomenon of rapid exchange of regulatory proteins with binding sites in the genome.  He recently found that this dynamic mechanism of receptor/genome interaction is critically involved in the physiological action of nuclear receptors.  He is currently Chief of the Laboratory of Receptor Biology and Gene Expression, and Chair of the Center of Excellence in Chromosome Biology at the NCI.  His program interests include the role of chromatin structure in gene regulation, mechanisms of nuclear receptor action, genome-wide organization of regulatory elements, and the architecture of active genes in the interphase nucleus.

• Dr Duncan Odom, University of Cambridge, Cancer Research UK, and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK

Biography

Duncan Odom obtained his PhD from Caltech in 2001 in Bio-Inorganic Chemistry, and then changed fields to pursue a postdoc in genetics and genomics with Rick Young at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, where his work transcriptional regulatory networks in human tissues.

More recently, his laboratory and its collaborators at the University of Cambridge have begun using interspecies experimental data to explore how regulatory networks evolve.  He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2008) and is an EMBO Young Investigator (2010).

• Dr Rupali Patwardhan, University of Washington, USA

Biography

Rupali Patwardhan  is a graduate student with Dr Jay Shendure in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. He is currently working towards developing massively parallel methods to characterize the functional impact of mutations in elements that control gene expression, and more generally, is interested in developing scalable technologies and algorithms that will help better predict the impact of variants in the human genome. Before joining the graduate program at UW, he received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from University of Mumbai (Bombay), India, and a Masters in Bioinformatics from Indiana University, Bloomington.

• Dr Rainer König, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Biography not yet available

• Dr Peter Scacheri, Case Western, USA

Biography not yet available