Synthetic and Systems Approaches to Interrogate Spatiotemporal Processes in Cancer (May 13 Speakers)
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Meeting Co-Chair: Zev Gartner
University of San Francisco
Professor
Dr. Gartner completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at UC Berkeley where he worked as a Beckman Fellow with Dr. Yeon-Kyun Shin. He received a PhD in Chemical Biology as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow with David Liu at Harvard University, and completed training as Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow with Carolyn Bertozzi at UC Berkeley. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco and co-director of the NSF Center for Cellular Construction. His lab is working to understand the principles governing the self-organization of human tissues, with the goal of engineering tissues for regenerative medicine and stabilizing tissues for cancer prevention. His work has been honored with the NIH New Innovator Award and the DOD Era of Hope Scholars award. He was selected among the Popular Science “Brilliant 10” in 2015 and as a Chan/Zuckerberg Biohub investigator in 2017.
https://gartnerlab.ucsf.edu/ -
Meeting Co-Chair: Laura Heiser
Oregon Health & Science University
Associate Professor
My laboratory uses integrated computational and experimental techniques to uncover mechanisms of therapeutic response and disease progression in cancer. We use a variety of state-of-the-art imaging and molecular techniques to deeply examine how diverse cells that make up tumors respond to various stimuli so that this information can be used to develop predictive computational models. I have served as vice chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and as co-leader of the Quantitative Oncology Program at the Knight Cancer Institute. I have led multiple collaborative interdisciplinary projects, including serving as co-PI on an NHGRI U54 LINCS Center grant designed to interrogate the influence of microenvironmental factors on epithelial cells. I have also served as PI on an NCI U54 Cancer Systems Biology Consortium Center grant focused on understanding the role of microenvironmental signals in modulating cell state heterogeneity and therapeutic response.
https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/heiser-lab -
Adam Stevens
adam.stevens@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
University of Pennsylvania
Assistant Professor
Adam Stevens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He received a B.A. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University and completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Biology at Princeton University in the lab of Dr. Tom Muir. Adam carried out a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Wendell Lim at UCSF, where he engineered a toolkit of synthetic cellular adhesion molecules (synCAMs) that combine orthogonal extracellular interactions with signaling domains from CAMs to yield programmable cell-cell interactions with tunable interface morphology and adhesion strength. These synCAMs were applied to direct specific multicellular assembly and complex tissue interactions.
https://stevens.bio/