QMB Epigenetics Speakers

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We have a wide range of international speakers including:

Professor Andy Feinberg, Johns Hopkins Univeristy School of Medicine, U.S.A.
Andrew Feinberg studied mathematics and humanities at Yale in the Directed Studies honors program, and he received his B.A. (1973) and M.D. (1976) from the accelerated medical program at Johns Hopkins University, as well as an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins (1981). He performed a postdoctoral fellowship in developmental biology at UCSD, clinical training in medicine at University of Pennsylvania, and genetics research and clinical training at Johns Hopkins, where he discovered epigenetic alterations in human cancer in 1983. He was a Howard Hughes investigator at University of Michigan from 1986-1994, when he returned to Johns Hopkins as King Fahd Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Medicine. His work includes the discovery of human imprinted genes, loss of imprinting (LOI) in cancer, and the molecular basis of Beckwith\Wiedemann syndrome (BWS), the paradigm of epigenetic cancer syndromes. His discovery of epigenetically altered progenitor cells has led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of carcinogenesis. More recently, he has pioneered studies of the epigenetic basis of disease generally, establishing the first epigenome center in the U.S. He is Director of the Center for Epigenetics in the Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences at Johns Hopkins, King Fahd Professor of Medicine, Molecular Biology & Genetics and Oncology, as well as Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and he holds an Adjunct Professorship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. His honors include election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as membership on the ISI most cited authors list, a MERIT Award of the National Cancer Institute, a Doctor of Philosophy (Hon. Caus.) from Uppsala University, the President’s Diversity Recognition Award of Johns Hopkins University, a Doctor of Philosophy (Hon. Caus.) from the Karolinska Institute, and the Feodor Lynen Medal.

Professor Rob Martienssen, CSHL, U.S.A
Rob Martienssen is a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Martienssen obtained his PhD at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge University. He received postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor in 1989. Research in Dr. Martienssen's laboratory focuses on epigenetic mechanisms that shape and regulate the genome, and their impact on development and inheritance. His work on transposable elements in plants and repetitive sequences in fission yeast revealed a link between heterochromatin and RNA interference. He received the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Award in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

Professor David Tremethick, The John Curtin School of Medical Research
David received his BSc (Hons) in 1983 (University of Sydney) and my PhD in 1989 (Macquarie University and CSIRO). His PhD studies involved studying the role of chromosomal proteins in regulating transcription. David was awarded a NIH Fogarty Fellowship and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester in the US where he developed an in vitro chromatin assembly to study how chromatin contributes to and regulates the gene activation process. David returned to Australia and established his own laboratory at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the ANU. The aim of David’s group is to understand and link chromatin structure with its role in controlling the differentiation process by studying histone variants. David is currently the head of the Genome Biology Department.

Dr Lucia Clemens-Daxinger, Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Aus.
Lucia is a postdoctoral researcher in Emma Whitelaw’s lab at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. She received her PhD in Genetics from the University of Vienna, Austria in 2008. Lucia is particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms of epigenetic modification and how these mechanisms influence phenotype. Her work focuses on the identification of novel genes involved in epigenetic modifications using a random ENU mutagenesis screen in mice.

Dr Jean Finnegan, CSIRO, Aus.
Jean's work on epigenetics started in 1991 when her lab cloned the first plant gene (METI) that encodes an epigenetic modifier and demonstrated the importance of DNA methylation in regulating plant development. Her work has contributed to our understanding of the epigenetic control of vernalization C the promotion of flowering by prolonged periods of cold C in both Arabidopsis and cereals. Jean's group have showed that this response is not mediated by changes in DNA methylation, as thought, but that Polycomb proteins regulate the key genes in this response. Jean is currently exploring the role of epigenetic control in regulating other agronomically important traits.

Dr Clare Stirzaker, Gaven Institute of Medical Research, Aus.
Dr Clare Stirzaker completed her BSc Hons at Cape Town University (1983) and PhD at CSRIO Division of Molecular Biology (1990).   In 1994 she joined the Cancer Epigenetics Research Group, directed by Prof Susan Clark, and is now Group Leader of Epigenome Technology at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney.  She has played a major role in developing new epigenetic technologies to address and enable the research questions in epigenetic research over the past 15 years within the Clark group, including ongoing optimization of bisulphite sequencing for DNA methylation analysis, development of genome-wide analysis of methylated DNA (MBDCap  and MeDIP) and chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by next-generation sequencing.  Dr Stirzaker’s early work focused on elucidating the triggers of abnormal methylation in cancer and the temporal relationship between gene expression, DNA hypermethylation and chromatin modifications in prostate cancer cells. More recently her work has enabled the discovery from the group that large chromosomal domains in colon cancer are silenced and this led to a recent publication in Nature Cell Biology (2010) on Long Range Epigenetic Silencing in prostate cancer.  The current research focus is to build an epigenome map of prostate cancer to understand the mechanisms involved in epigenetic deregulation of chromosomal domains.

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