The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Titia de Lange, Ph.D., Leon Hess Professor and head, Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. de Lange's lab focuses on mammalian telomeres, which are made up of long arrays of double-stranded TTAGGG repeats that end in a single-stranded overhang. The telomeric repeats wither away in a shortening process that is associated with DNA replication and cell proliferation. Telomerase, the reverse transcriptase that adds TTAGGG repeats to chromosome ends, can counteract this attrition and stabilizes telomeres in the germ line. However, telomerase is absent from most human cells, and as a result, many somatic cells eventually die due to depletion of their telomere reserve. Cancer cells, on the other hand, often reactivate telomerase, thereby achieving unlimited proliferative potential. The goal of Dr. de Lange's research is to understand how telomeres protect chromosome ends, and what happens when telomere function is lost during the early stages of tumorigenesis before telomerase is activated.

Dr. de Lange earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Cancer Institute in 1985. From 1985 to 1990 she was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was one of the first to isolate the telomeres of human chromosomes. She came to Rockefeller in 1990 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and professor in 1997. She was named the Leon Hess Professor in 1999 and is an American Cancer Society Research Professor. She is director of the university's Anderson Center for Cancer Research.

Among other awards, Dr. de Lange is the recipient of the 2012 Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the 2011 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, the 2010 AACR Clowes Memorial Award, the 2008 Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Prize, the 2005 NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the 2004 Charlotte Friend Memorial Award from the AACR and the first Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, in 2001. She is an elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Open to

Public

Host

Jim Darnell

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Robert Houghtaling

Phone

(212) 327-8072

Sponsor

Robert Houghtaling
(212) 327-8072
rhoughtali@rockefeller.edu