The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D., Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor, head, Robin Chemers Neustein Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

According to Webster, memory “is the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms.” It has generally been thought to be the privilege of the brain, and indeed as most neurons are long-lived, they have the capacity to store memories of their experiences and recall them months later. However, many tissues of our body learn from their past experiences, and like memories that occur in the brain, tissue memories have both beneficial and maladaptive consequences. An excellent example of this is our barrier epithelial tissues such as the skin, lung and gut, which are the first line of defense between our body and the outside world. These tissues harbor reservoirs of long-lived, self-renewing stem cells that rejuvenate the barrier during normal homeostasis and restore it when damaged by wounds, mechanical stress, ultraviolet radiation, pathogens and irritants. How do epithelial stem cells equip themselves to cope with these harmful stresses? The Fuchs laboratory discovered that when stem cells encounter diverse stresses, their chromatin develops and stores epigenetic memories, some for life, with profound consequences. The lab focuses on the underlying mechanisms and consequences of long-term memory and dissecting the complex interactions between stem cells and their environment that are evolutionarily optimized for tissue fitness but go awry in chronic inflammation and cancer. 

Elaine Fuchs uses skin as a model to understand how stem cells make and repair tissues and what goes awry in cancers and inflammation. She is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and has published >380 manuscripts. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton in Biochemistry, her postdoctorate in Cell Biology at MIT, and was recruited from the University of Chicago to Rockefeller University in 2002. Her awards include the National Medal of Science, L’Oreal-UNESCO Award, International Society for Stem Cell Research’s Innovation Award, the Gairdner International Award and the Franklin Medal. Fuchs holds membership in the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Philosophical Society, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society. She is an inaugural member of the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research, and currently serves as its President.   

Open to

Tri-Institutional