Translating Discoveries in Synaptic Plasticity and Brain Disease
Event Details
- Type
- Monday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Robert Darnell, M.D., Ph.D., Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor, senior attending physician, head, Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology, The Rockefeller University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Speaker bio(s)
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RNA binding proteins (RBPs) regulate all aspects of biology. The Darnell lab has discovered the existence of neuron-specific RBPs in mammalian brain by studying paraneoplastic neurologic disorders (PNDs), diseases associated with cancer, tumor immunity and autoimmune brain disease. This discovery pushed forward the question of why neurons have their own system for regulating RNA, and led the lab to develop CLIP, a widely used method to covalently crosslink regulatory RBPs to their binding spots on RNA. CLIP is used in brains, tissues and cells, to study RNA regulation in neurons, cancer, viral infections, and autoimmunity. Recently the lab has refined CLIP to allow the study of individual cellular and subcellular RNA regulation, uncovering new insights to protein-synthesis dependent synaptic plasticity and memory. Relating this work to clinical medicine is leading to new approaches to understanding RNA regulation and dysregulation in neurologic disease, cancer and autoimmunity.
Robert B. Darnell received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1979. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. in 1985 from Washington University School of Medicine. Darnell continued his medical training during an internship and residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai, and a residency in neurology at New York Hospital. He joined Rockefeller in 1992 as an assistant professor, became associate professor in 1997, and professor in 2000. Darnell has been a senior physician of The Rockefeller University Hospital since 2000 and was president, CEO, and scientific director of The New York Genome Center from 2012 to 2016. He has also been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2002.Darnell has received honors including an Irma T. Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Trust Research Award, a Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award, an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, and an NINDS Outstanding Investigator Award. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media. - Open to
- Campus Only