Past Retreats: 2009 Speaker Profiles

Wai-Yee Chan, Ph.D., is Head and Principal Investigator of the Section of Developmental Genomics in the Program in Reproductive and Adult Endocrinology of NICHD. He received his B.Sc. in chemistry from the Chinese University of Hong Kong then completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Florida. Prior to coming to the NIH in 2001, Dr. Chan was Professor of pediatrics, biochemistry, molecular and cell biology at Georgetown University, and later became Chief of the Division of Genetics and Metabolic Diseases in the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Chan has won several awards including, in 2008, the Presidential Award from the Association of Chinese Geneticists in America. His group focuses on regulation of gene expression, cellular proliferation, and differentiation in mammalian development. Specifically, the group uses spermatogenesis as a model for the study of genetic regulation of germ cell development and differentiation in addition to studying the molecular genetics of aberrant sexual development in humans caused by mutations in the luteinizing hormone receptor.

Dan Crooks is a Predoctoral Fellow in the NIH Graduate Partnerships Program, and is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Biochemistry Department at the Georgetown University Medical Center. Dan is performing his doctoral research with the Section on Human Iron Metabolism, which is part of the NICHD Molecular Medicine Program headed by Dr. Tracey Rouault. Dan received a Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also completed a Master’s Degree in Environmental Toxicology at the same university, where he performed research on the neurotoxicity of the industrially-relevant metal manganese.

In the Section on Human Iron Metabolism, Dan is currently studying regulatory aspects of the heme biosynthetic pathway in both in-vitro and mouse models, and is also working on the molecular and biochemical mechanisms of a human hereditary myopathy caused by deficiency of an iron-sulfur cluster assembly protein.

Jason DeRouchey, Ph.D., is a visiting fellow in the Laboratory of Dr. Adrian Parsegian, in NICHD’s Program on Physical and Structural Biology. He studies DNA condensation by measuring the thermodynamic forces between DNA helices and how these forces change in the presence of polycations. DeRouchey began working on polycation/DNA condensation in non-viral gene therapy constructs as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich working with Professor Joachim Rädler. DeRouchey completed his undergraduate work at the University of Texas, Dallas and then did his doctoral work in polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, working with Professor Tom Russell on electric field alignment of nanostructures within diblock copolymer thin films.

David Edwards, Ph.D., is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is a biomedical engineer and writer actively involved in the translation of ideas from the university through novel medical technology, and the writing, performing, and visual arts. His scientific research concerns the mathematical design of novel physical parameters that allow nanostructured materials to efficiently deliver drugs and vaccines to the lungs and other human organs, with a special focus on infectious diseases in developing world nations. Current work in his laboratory includes the development of novel antibiotic therapies for tuberculosis and a new delivery platform for needle-free childhood vaccines. Medicine in Need, or MEND, is an international not-for-profit organization that translates research from Dr. Edwards's lab to clinical practice in South Africa and other developing world environments. Dr. Edwards is the co-author of numerous scientific publications in the fields of fluid mechanics, interfacial transport phenomena, drug delivery, and aerosol science. A member of the National Academy of Engineering since 2001, Edwards has won many national and international awards. His artistic work includes founding and direction of Le Laboratoire, a new innovation space in downtown Paris, where artists and scientists perform collaborative experiments.

Abstract: Ready access to information has driven many institutions from the information-based models of the past in search of models more characteristic of the research university. In the ideal research university, students and researchers learn, and eventually implement, approaches to meet and productively respond to rapidly changing and often seemingly intractable challenges in basic research, social, industrial and cultural contexts. Value is less associated with what is known, or owned, than with a record of learning, communicating and implementing novel approaches to rapidly changing circumstances. Since implementation frequently occurs within highly specialized organizational environments this capacity for 'innovation' implies an ability to cross disciplines in the path of idea development, or translation, in a process of creative thought I refer to as artscience. [i]

My scientific work has in recent years focused on the challenge to find innovative solutions to one of the most intractable and poignant problems today: human health in the most impoverished parts of the world. While the pharmaceutical industry has produced 383 new drugs and vaccines since 1996, the current vaccine for tuberculosis was approved over 87 years ago and to date we have no viable vaccines for HIV/AIDS and malaria. Yet combined these three infection diseases account for more than seven million deaths per year, mostly in impoverished parts of the world. [2]

We are developing new drug and vaccine delivery platforms that permit low cost, high-volume, stable and needle-free products suitable to conditions in the developing world. Our lead drug project, an inhaled capreomyicin for eliminating injections in multiple drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB), is in early human clinical trials. Our lead vaccine project, an inhaled TB vaccine based on the current BCG vaccine, is in toxicology studies in preparation for human clinical testing. We have developed an international nonprofit, Medicine in Need, or MEND, with a manufacturing base in Pretoria, South Africa, to build research and development infrastructure in one of the regions of the world hardest hit by the infectious disease epidemic afflicting many developing world countries. [3] MEND has an administrative and research base in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard University, and a communication base in Paris, France. The former engages undergraduate students at Harvard University and other universities in year-long "idea translation" projects around global health issues, using various 'boundaries' between the arts and sciences as catalysts for innovation. The latter is based at the new innovation center, Le Laboratoire, where artists and scientists collaborate on 'experiments' around critical topics in culture, research, industry and society. [4] Each year one of these experiments focuses on the problem of global health and aims to catalyze innovative thinking in the pharmaceutical effort to develop drugs and vaccines for diseases of poverty.

[i] Edwards, David Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard Press 2008).

[2] Bethan Hughes, “2007 FDA drug approvals: a year of flux,” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 7, no. 2 (February 2008): 107–109.

[3] Edwards, David. "A creative gap in the medical science fight against infectious disease." Brown Journal of World Affairs (to appear 2008).

[4] Edwards, David "Paris gets a new cultural crucible." Nature, 449, 789 (2007).

Stephanie Fliedner is a predoctoral visiting fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Karel Pacak, Section on Medical Neuroendocrinology in NICHD’s Program of Reproductive and Adult Endocrinology, in a joint program with Professor Hendrik Lehnert, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany. She is studying the molecular characteristics of pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma, focusing on the identification of markers of malignancy. Ms. Fliedner received her pre-diploma (comparable to a bachelor’s degree) in chemical engineering from the Technical University in Karlsruhe, Germany before moving into the field of Neuroscience. She finished her Diploma in Neuroscience (comparable to a master’s degree) at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany.

Claudia Gebert, D.V.M., Ph.D., is a visiting fellow from Germany in the laboratory of Dr. Karl Pfeifer, in the NICHD Program in Genomics of Differentiation. Since 2005, she has been studying genomic imprinting of the mouse Insulin-like growth factor 2 (Igf2)/H19 locus with Dr. Pfeifer. Prior to this, she worked as a veterinarian, and later received her Ph.D. from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany, studying DNA methylation of the IGF2 gene in bovine preimplantation embryos.

Tyrone Hayes, Ph.D., received his Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. This propelled his interest in unraveling the role of hormones in mediating developmental responses to environmental changes in vertebrates. After a short postdoctoral stint at NICHD, NCI, and UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1994. In 1998, he was appointed Associate Professor with tenure at Berkeley, becoming the youngest tenured professor in the department; and then in 2002 he was promoted to full Professor, all by age 35. Through his research, he came to realize that the most important environmental factors affecting amphibian development are synthetic chemicals (such as pesticides) that interact with hormones in a variety of ways to alter developmental responses. His studies have made headlines and alerted the public to health and wildlife dangers from pesticide exposure. He is an engaging scientist who is not afraid of presenting data that goes against the mainstream. He conducts laboratory and field studies in the U.S and Africa. He is also an enthusiastic teacher. His accomplishments as mentor and scientist include, to mention a few, the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Distinguished Mentor Award from the University of California Berkeley, the Jennifer Altman Award for Integrity in Science (Jennifer Altman Foundation), the Rachel Carson Memorial Award (Pesticide Action Network), the National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award (NGS), the President’s Citation Award (American Institute of Biological Sciences), and January 24, 2005 was proclaimed “Dr. Tyrone Hayes Day” by the Mayor of the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds joint appointments in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the Group in Endocrinology, the Molecular Toxicology Group, and the Energy and Resources Group.

Kameha Kidd, Ph.D., joined the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) at NIH as a Health Science Policy Analyst in May of 2006. In this position, she manages the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Consortium web systems. She oversaw the creation and implementation of the Consortium’s web site, CTSAweb.org, the login required wiki, and the CTSA e-Newsletter. She currently oversees the content and development of these web communication systems and organizes any promotional and training activities associated with them. Kidd also serves as the NIH coordinator for the CTSA Communications Key Function Committee, bringing together the current 38 CTSA grantee institutions to share best practices and address the consortium’s communication needs.

Prior to her position at NCRR, Kidd was an IRTA (Intramural Research Training Award) fellow with NICHD from 2003-2006. During her postdoc at NICHD she studied vascular development in the zebrafish. Her research involved using genetic mutation as a method of characterizing signaling pathways associated with arteriovenous differentiation.

Kidd received her B.S. in Biology from Marquette University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Physiology, from the University of Arizona in 2002.

Julian Lui, Ph.D., is a visiting fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Baron in NICHD’s Program in Developmental Endocrinology and Genetics. Dr. Lui studies the regulation of somatic growth and determination of mammalian body size. He completed his undergraduate work at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and did his doctoral work in biochemistry at the same institute, working with Professor SK Kong on human erythropoiesis.

Saravana Murthy, Ph.D., is a visiting fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Peng Loh, in NICHD’s Program on Cellular Neurobiology. He studies a novel splice variant of Carboxypeptidase E, ΔN-CPE and its mechanism in epigenetic gene regulation. Dr. Murthy completed his master’s degree at Bangalore University, India and for his doctorate went to Max Planck Institute, Goettingen, Germany to work on SK2 channels and its splice variants. He came to the US as a visiting PhD student at the University of Hawaii and later joined Dr. Loh’s lab as a visiting fellow; since then he has been working on the epigenetic mechanism of ΔN-CPE.

Karl Pfeifer, Ph.D., graduated from George Washington University and spent 4 years as a lab tech before deciding it was time to try for some more independence. He went to MIT and did his thesis research with Lenny Guarente, using molecular and genetic approaches to study transcriptional regulation in yeast. For his postdoctoral research, he wanted to stick with genetics and stick with a model organism approach but find one that was a bit more susceptible to translational research. So he was happy to join Shirley Tilghman’s lab at Princeton University where he became very interested in this newly recognized phenomenon called genomic imprinting. Lenny and Shirley are both great teachers and great experimentalists and he was very lucky to have the chance to train with each of them. Dr. Pfeifer joined the NICHD in 1995 as a tenure-track investigator in Heiner Westphal’s laboratory. He continued his research in genomic imprinting using regulation of the mouse distal 7 imprinting complex as a way to understand how epigenetic mechanisms regulate gene expression and development and, conversely, how developmental processes modulate the epigenome. His research group has also been interested in understanding the molecular basis for diseases associated with this imprinting complex in humans, and they have generated some interesting mouse models for cardiac arrhythmia.

Brian Plosky, Ph.D., is currently an Associate Editor for the journal Molecular Cell, www.molecule.org, which is part of the Cell Press Family of journals. Scientific editors at journals are distinct from the editors who handle the actual production of the journal (i.e , copy editors or managing editors). The job focuses on the content of the journal and services to the scientists who read the journal and submit manuscripts to the journal. Primarily, scientific editors read original research manuscripts that are submitted to the journal and determine whether or not they would be a good fit for the journal. If they decide that a manuscript should undergo peer review, then they coordinate the review and any revision processes with the external reviewers and the authors. Ultimately, based on this process, the scientific editors decide whether a paper is to be published in the journal. Additionally, editors solicit review articles and work on some of the added features on the website. Outside of the actual content of the journal, editors also travel to several meetings each year and occasionally organize meetings in order to stay in touch with scientists and keep up on the latest findings in the fields where the journal publishes.

Dr. Plosky graduated from Colgate University in 1997 with a B.A. in Molecular Biology, then went on to the Ph.D. program in Biology at New York University where he studied the interplay between transcription and DNA repair. In 2001 he started as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Roger Woodgate (Chief, Laboratory of Genomic Integrity) in NICHD. He worked on what was, at the time, a new family of DNA polymerases involved in tolerance of DNA damage. He joined Cell Press in November 2006. His research training along with a general interest in the types of papers that Molecular Cell publishes were important in providing him with the necessary scientific expertise for this job.

Mihaela Serpe, Ph.D., leads the Unit on Cellular Communication, in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program of NICHD. Her group investigates molecular mechanisms that regulate cellular signaling during development using the Drosophila melanogaster model system.

Dr. Serpe did her undergraduate studies at University of Bucharest, Romania, and obtained an M.S. degree in Biochemistry. She became interested in signaling and stress sensing while working on lipoprotein oxidation and atherosclerosis at the Institute of Cellular Biology and Pathology, Bucharest. This interest guided her to Dr. Dan Kosman’s lab at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she completed her Ph.D. studies on metal sensing and stress response in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ela Serpe did her postdoctoral training in Dr. Mike O’Connor’s lab, at the University of Minnesota and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. There, she utilized Drosophila melanogaster to study how cells reproducibly and selectively interpret spatial information within a complex developing field. Ela Serpe has focused on signaling by TGF-beta growth and differentiation factors and uncovered molecular mechanisms that apply to developmental processes as diverse as formation and interpretation of morphogen gradients, axon guidance and formation of neural circuitry in Drosophila.

How TGF-beta signaling is regulated outside the cell continues to be the focus of the unit that Ela Serpe is leading at NICHD. The group studies several genes that modulate the function and distribution of the signaling ligands in time and space. For example, secreted BMP-binding proteins such as Short gastrulation and Crossveinless-2 have versatile effects on signaling, and promote or inhibit signaling depending on context. Serpe’s group uses a series of biochemical, genetic, and computational approaches to describe, in molecular terms, how these different modulators can function and cause remarkably context-specific gains or losses in signaling. Ela Serpe’s goal is to provide genetic and biochemical descriptions of how signaling is modulated outside the cell and how it has been adapted for different roles during development and evolution. Serpe’s group is also expanding these studies to address the role of the cell surface in regulating the local activation of TGF-beta-type signaling. This is a relatively unexplored area and has important implications for both normal developmental processes as well as pathologic conditions, such as the invasive behavior of cells during tumor metastasis.