VOLUME 13, NUMBER 02 • OCTOBER 5, 2001

Faculty news:Seven new researchers to head laboratories

			New faculty, top row, left to right: Coller, Dhodapkar, Funabiki, Leibler. Bottom row, left to right: Papavasiliou, Shaham, Stebbins.

The Rockefeller University welcomes seven new faculty members to campus during the 2001-2002 academic year. More detailed profiles will appear in future issues of News&Notes this year.

Barry S. Coller joins The Rockefeller University as vice president for medical affairs, physician-in-chief and head of a new Laboratory of Blood and Vascular Biology. He was the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine and chairman of the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as chief of the Medical Service of the Mount Sinai Hospital. Coller, who is the university's first David Rockefeller Professor, focuses on the vascular biology of sickle cell disease.

Assistant Professor Madhav Dhodapkar will head the new Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy. Dhodapkar has conducted his research on the interactions between tumors and the immune system in tumor-bearing patients in the Steinman laboratory since 1998. Dhodapkar's research focuses on incurable multiple myeloma (MM) as an immune-host tumor model, and his clinical studies at The Rockefeller University Hospital investigate whether dendritic cells can help boost the immune system resistance to MM.

Hironori Funabiki, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Andrew Murray at Harvard, will join the university in January 2002 as assistant professor and head of a new Laboratory of Chromosome and Cell Biology. Funabiki studies the molecular processes that regulate the structure and configuration of chromosomes during the cell division cycle. Through the characterization of novel proteins and RNAs that bind to chromosomes, he addresses the question of how cells developed elaborate mechanisms to control their accurate reproduction, the failure of which causes birth defects and contributes to tumor progression.

Professor Stanislas Leibler, formerly of Princeton, will head a new laboratory in the Center for Studies in Physics and Biophysics. At Princeton Leibler studied the "collective phenomena" occurring in biological systems, in particular, bacterial movement in response to chemical signals, which suggests that a certain "robustness" may be a fundamental characteristic of life.

Rockefeller University alumna F. Nina Papavasiliou returns to the university this fall as assistant professor and head of the new Laboratory of Lymphocyte Diversity. Papavasiliou completed her graduate studies here in 1998, in Professor Michel Nussenzweig's Laboratory of Molecular Immunology. Her current work focuses on the how the immune system–specifically via B lymphocytes-creates a vast, discerning antibody catalog from only a limited amount of genetic material.

Assistant Professor Shai Shaham, who will head a new laboratory of Developmental Genetics, studies the molecular events underlying the process of programmed cell death, a characteristic form of cell death that occurs during the development of all multicellular animals. Programmed cell death is important for proper development and is misregulated in several disease states in humans, including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and stroke and other organ infarctions. Shaham is interested in understanding how developmental cell fate signals regulate programmed cell death, a problem currently not well understood. Shaham comes to Rockefeller from a postdoctoral fellowship with Ira Herskowitz and Cori Bargmann at the University of California, San Francisco.

C. Erec Stebbins, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Jorge Galán, will head the Laboratory of Structural Microbiology. He studies the intricate biochemical interactions that occur between infectious microbes and host cells. Using techniques from biochemistry, microbial cell biology and structural biology, he plans to construct a structural library of virulence factors-proteins that bacteria employ to infect host cells. Such models will provide new insight into bacterial pathogenesis and ultimately aid in the design of novel antibiotics.