Beckman Symposium 2006 - Evolution! Molecules to Man

October 9, 2006 | Fairchild Auditorium

A.M.

8:00 Continental Breakfast    
8:45 Lucy Shapiro, Stanford University Director, Beckman Center for Molecular & Genetic Medicine and Professor of Developmental Biology Welcome
8:50 Roeland Nusse, Stanford University Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Developmental Biology Introductory Remarks
9:00 Susan Lindquist, Whitehead Institute - MIT Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Biology Protein Folding Potentiating Evolutionary Change
9:45 David Haussler, UC Santa Cruz Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Reconstructing 100 Million Years of Human Evolutionary History
10:30   BREAK  
10:45 Floyd E. Romesberg, Scripps Research Institute Assistant Professor of Chemistry The Evolution of Biomolecular Function
11:30 Margaret McFall-Ngai, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor of Medical Microbiology & Immunology

 The Consequences of Evolving with Microbial Partners: Insights from the Squid-Vibrio Association

P.M.

12:15   LUNCH  
1:30 Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI-Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Director, Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and Researcher, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory From Microbes to Neanderthals
2:15 Dmitri Petrov, Stanford University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Beyond the Neutral Theory: Genomic Evidence of Extensive Adaptation in Drosophila
3:00   BREAK  
3:15 David Kingsley, Stanford University Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Developmental Biology Fishing for the Secrets of Vertebrate Evolution
4:00 Roeland Nusse, Stanford University   Closing Remarks

Speaker Profiles

David Haussler is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. He is developing new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular evolution of the human genome, integrating cross-species comparative and high throughput genomics data to study gene structure, function and regulation.

David Kingsley is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is interested in the genetic control of skeletal development and patterning in mice, formation and maintenance of joints, arthritis and joint disease in humans, and the molecular basis of evolutionary changes in skeletal patterns of different organisms.

Susan Lindquist is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a member of the faculty of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Professor of Biology at the MIT. She is interested in how such diverse processes as stress tolerance, neurodegenerative disease, and heredity can be governed by changes in protein conformation. Her research on prion proteins has provided the definitive evidence for a new form of genetics, based upon the inheritance of proteins with new, self-perpetuating shapes rather than new DNA sequences.

Margaret McFall-Ngai is Professor of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Medicine and Public Health. Her research focuses on the symbiotic associations between animals and prokaryotes, specifically the establishment and maintenance of a symbiosis, the influence of bacteria on animal development, and the evolution of animal-bacterial interactions.

Dmitri Petrov is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. His laboratory studies the mutation and evolution of global genomic properties, the evolution and population dynamic of transposable elements in eukaryotes, and the evolution of gene duplications.

Floyd E. Romesberg is Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute. He seeks to understand and evolve novel protein function by expanding the genetic code, to understand the molecular basis of DNA damage, repair, and mutagenesis, and to use femto­second laser pulses to probe protein dynamics.

Eddy Rubin is Senior Scientist and Director of the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and Director of the Genomics Division, Department of Genome Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research involves the development of computational and biological approaches to the analysis of DNA sequence data. Emphasis is on the use of large-scale cross-species DNA sequence comparisons to identify regions of the human genome that encode important biological functions.