The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, Ph.D., professor emeritus of cell biology, Harvard Medical School, Notch Signaling as a Paradigm for Biological Complexity

Iva Greenwald, Ph.D., Da Costa Professor of Biology at the Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, LIN-12/Notch and the Awesome Power of C. elegans Genetics

Speaker bio(s)

Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, a molecular biologist and developmental geneticist, is currently Emeritus in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France in Paris. He joined Harvard in 1998 and was elected Professor at the Collège de France, holding the Chair of Biology and Genetics in 1999. He is the founding Director of the Developmental and Regenerative Biology Program at Harvard Medical School (from 1999-2007) and served as the Isselbacher-Schwartz at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.

He completed his undergraduate studies in chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich before earning his Ph.D. from Cambridge University for work carried out at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. After postdoctoral work at the Biozentrum in Basel and at Stanford University, he joined the Yale faculty in 1981. He was appointed Professor in the Department of Biology in 1989 and then, concurrently, Professor at the Department of Cell Biology at the Yale School of Medicine. He also served as the Director of the Biological Sciences Division at Yale.

From 1987 to 1998, he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator until he left for Harvard, where he was appointed Professor of Cell Biology. He is the Founding Director of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Institut Curie, Paris (2007-2009). From 2012 to March 2017, he served as Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President at Biogen.

His laboratory has been studying cellular interactions in development and disease and pioneered the use of genetic and molecular approaches to define and analyze the Notch signaling pathway. Currently, at his Harvard Medical School laboratory, he is using genetic tools to dissect neurodegeneration pathways related to human disease and is using proteomic approaches to address, among others, the functional complexity of the Notch signaling pathway.

Professor Artavanis-Tsakonas is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of EMBO, a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens, and a member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Iva Greenwald received her B.S. from Cornell in 1977, her Ph.D. from MIT in 1982, and conducted postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 1983-1986. From 1986-1992 she was on the faculty of Princeton University, and moved to the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University on the medical campus in 1993. Since 2016, Greenwald has had a primary appointment in the Dept. of Biological Sciences on the Morningside campus of Columbia, where her lab is currently located. Her honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 2005.

Open to

Tri-Institutional