March 10 Mar 10
2025
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Monday Mon

SAVE THE DATE: 2025 Katharine D. McCormick Lecture with Ruth Lehmann, PhD

Berg Hall, 2nd floor, Li Ka Shing Center

Please join us for Dr. Lehmann’s presentation “The Egg to Embryo Transition: Controlling Information Flow Between Generations”.

Speaker

Ruth Lehmann, PhD, President and Director, Whitehead Institute and professor of biology at MIT

Dr. Ruth Lehmann, PhD, has long been fascinated with the biology of germ cells, the cells that mature into egg and sperm, and thus the only cells in the body with the potential to generate a completely new organism. The lab has discovered how germ cells are specified in the early embryo, how they migrate to the somatic gonad by lipid guidance, and how they maintain the potential for totipotency while differentiating into egg and sperm in the adult. Most recently, her lab uses super-resolution imaging to gain new insight into how RNAs self-sort and are translated within germ granules, the membrane-less condensates of germ cells, and studies the mechanisms by which mitochondria and other maternally provided organelles are protected and selected as they are passed on from the oocyte to the next generation. 

Dr. Lehmann has been the president and director of the Whitehead Institute and a Professor of Biology at MIT since 2000 when she moved to Boston from the Skirball Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center, where she had been a professor, director of the Skirball Institute, and chair of the Department of Cell Biology.  Dr. Lehmann has been recognized by election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, EMBO (Associate member), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (foreign member), and Fellowship of the Royal Society. She holds an honorary degree from the University of Basel, Switzerland.

The McCormick Lectureship:
Katharine Dexter McCormick, an early feminist, devoted much of her long life to the welfare of women.  On her death at age 92, she left a large bequest to the Stanford University School of Medicine with the hope that it would be used “in aid of women students attending the School of Medicine and more generally for the encouragement and assistance of women in pursuing the study of medicine, in teaching medicine and engaging in medical research.”  The McCormick Lectureship is one of the ways of fulfilling the wishes of Dr. McCormick.