Half a Lifetime of Michael and Circadian Rhythms (35/70)

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Michael Rosbash, Ph.D., professor of biology, Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience, Brandeis University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. Rosbash will speak about four aspects of the circadian story while keeping the birthday celebration in mind:  “Something Olde, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue.”  (No Sixpence in your Shoe; too materialistic.)  This is for a wedding but it seems a useful guide nonetheless.

1) Something Olde:  Some intellectual history as well as some personal history. 2) Something New:  Some new results from the Rosbash lab as well as some looking forward towards the future for the field.  3) Something Borrowed:  How the field has made use of results and concepts from elsewhere, i.e., how intertwined the circadian field has (finally) become with other mainstream areas of molecular biology and neuroscience. 4) Something Blue: Where are the bruises? What might the field consider doing differently if we could rerun the last 35 years?

Michael Rosbash went to the Newton schools in greater Boston and then to Caltech, graduating in 1965 with a B.S. in Chemistry. He spent the 1965-1966 academic year in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar in the lab of Marianne Grunberg-Monago and then entered the Ph.D. program at MIT in the fall of 1966. Rosbash worked in the lab of Sheldon Penman and received a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1970. After a brief stint at the University of St. Andrews, he was a post-doc in the lab of John Bishop in the Department of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh from 1971-1974. Rosbash joined the faculty of Brandeis University in 1974 and was promoted to Professor of Biology in 1986. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1989.  

Rosbash has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression, especially RNA metabolism in yeast. He is best known however for his work in Drosophila that illuminated our current understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie circadian rhythms, the intrinsic clock that controls the cyclic behaviors of all animals. These same molecules, molecular machines and biological principles not only control Drosophila circadian clocks but also the ubiquitous process of circadian rhythmicity throughout the animal kingdom. This circadian clock also controls much of cell physiology and metabolism, again in all animals - from humans to Drosophila (fruit flies).

Rosbash and his Brandeis colleague Jeff Hall as well as Mike Young of the Rockefeller University have received numerous awards, including most recently the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They previously received the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2013), the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2013), the Massry Prize (2012), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2012), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Outstanding Basic Research (2011), and the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation Neuroscience Prize (2009). Rosbash also received the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award (2001), and he is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 
 

Open to

Public

Host

Michael Young

Reception

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

Contact

Justin Sloboda

Phone

(212) 327-7785

Sponsor

Justin Sloboda
(212) 327-7785
jsloboda@rockefeller.edu