Frontiers in Quantitative Biology Seminar

ANNA-KATERINA HADJANTONAKIS, MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER

Cancer is a condition promoted by cells undergoing an identity crisis. An understanding of how cells control their identity (cell fate specification), and how they organize themselves into normal tissues (morphogenesis) provides the blueprint for the fundamental biological processes that become deregulated in cancer. The Hadjantonakis laboratory uses high-resolution quantitative methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying stem cell specification, cellular differentiation, tissue organization and growth. They use the mammalian embryo as a platform, and the mouse as a primary model system. They also exploit in vitro cultured stem cells, including pluripotent stem cells, for their studies.

Frontiers in Quantitative Biology Seminar

NICOLE KING, UC BERKELEY

The origin of animals represents one of the pivotal transitions in life’s history, and one of its greatest unsolved mysteries. While the fossil record remains silent regarding the rise of multicellularity, the genetic and developmental foundations of animal origins may be deduced from shared elements among extant animals and their protozoan relatives, the choanoflagellates. To better understand the origin and evolution of animals, Dr. King's lab is reconstructing the minimal genomic complexity of the unicellular progenitors of animals; elucidating the ancestral functions of genes required for animal development; and characterizing choanoflagellate cell and developmental biology.

Frontiers in Quantitative Biology Seminar

FABIAN RUDOLF, ETH ZURICH

The Computational Systems Biology Group comprises biologists, computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who perform interdisciplinary research in systems and synthetic biology. They focus on developing and applying computational methods and mechanistic mathematical models to study complex cellular networks, to elucidate their operating principles, and to enable their rational re-design. Their biological applications rely on the group’s experimental biology part that uses budding yeast as a model organism, and on various external collaborations.

Stanford Bio-X would like to announce our call for applications for the Undergraduate Summer Research Program with funding available starting in the summer of 2020 (June 22nd through August 28th).

Complete applications must be received by December 2, 2019 at 5:00 pm PST. Short, five-minute interviews for the finalists will be conducted on December 5th and 6th.