Weill
Institute
Symposium
CELL SIGNALING AND MOLECULAR DYNAMICS
OCTOBER 13, 2015
CALL AUDITORIUM
KENNEDY HALL
ABOUT
W
THE WEILL INSTITUTE
elcome to the 4th biennial Symposium of the
Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology.
The Weill Institute opened in June 2008, endowed
through a generous gift by Joan and Sanford Weill, with
a vision to create a vibrant center of scientific excellence
in basic biology integrated with existing, outstanding
programs in chemistry and chemical biology, physics,
plant biology, computational biology, and engineering.
We have sought to attract the best faculty, students,
and postdocs and to establish an environment that
encourages cutting-edge research and the transfer of
ideas and technology.
2008 and designed by renowned architect Richard
Meier ‘57. Weill Hall has earned Cornell’s first LEED
Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Research in the Institute covers topics in cell signaling,
membrane trafficking, bacterial pathogenesis, cancer
biology and metastasis, DNA damage and repair,
neurodegeneration, and the regulation of the size and
shape of cells during development. Model organisms
including bacteria, yeast, flies, plants, and mice are
being used to discover the molecules and mechanisms
underlying these essential pathways toward the ultimate
goal of understanding human disease and improving
health.
Furthermore, in an effort to enhance the strength
of graduate education in cell biology at Cornell, the
institute provides some support to graduate fields,
allowing them to sponsor a greater number of students.
This support serves to reinforce ties between institute
faculty and graduate programs across campus.
The Weill Institute now includes twelve faculty members
with appointments in three Cornell colleges and five
departments: Biological Statistics & Computational
Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biology
and Genetics, Plant Biology, and Chemistry & Chemical
Biology. In addition to Scott Emr (Director), the institute
hosts a full professor (Anthony Bretscher), four
Associate Professors (Chris Fromme, Jan Lammerding,
Yuxin Mao, and Marcus Smolka), and five junior faculty
members (Jeremy Baskin, Chun Han, Fenghua Hu, The Weill Institute also seeks to help disseminate
Adrienne Roeder, and Haiyuan Yu). Tobias Doerr will cutting-edge research throughout the Cornell
join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in July of 2016. community. By sponsoring and organizing events
The Weill Institute labs are located within Weill Hall, a such as this one, the institute is helping to advance
state-of-the-art research building dedicated in October Cornell’s leadership in the life sciences revolution.
2
WEILL INSTITUTE SYMPOSIUM | OCTOBER 13, 2015
8:30 - 9:00 AM
Symposium Check-in & Continental Breakfast
9:00 - 9:15
Scott D. Emr, Director, Weill Institute for Cell & Molecular Biology
Opening Remarks
SESSION 1
Chair: Yuxin Mao, Weill Institute
9:15 - 9:55
Craig Roy, Yale University School of Medicine
10:00 - 10:40
Peter Walter, University of California, San Francisco
“From protein folding to cognition: the serendipitous pathway of
discovery”
10:45 - 11:10
Coffee Break
SESSION 2
Chair: Chris Fromme, Weill Institute
11:10 - 11:50
Ramanujan Hegde, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
“Mechanisms of membrane protein biogenesis and quality control”
11:55 - 12:35 PM
Kevan Shokat, University of California, San Francisco
“Non-traditional approaches to Drugging Traditional Targets”
12:40 - 1:45
Lunch Break
SESSION 3
Chair: Jeremy Baskin, Weill Institute
1:45 - 2:25
Hidde Ploegh, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
“From MHC trafficking and quality control to developing sortase as a
new protein fusion tool”
2:30 - 3:10
Kristin Scott, University of California, Berkeley
“Gustatory Processing in Drosophila”
3:15 - 3:35
Coffee Break
SESSION 4
Chair: Chun Han, Weill Institute
3:35 - 4:15
Craig Thompson, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
“Examining the role of growth factor signaling in the regulation of
cellular metabolism”
4:20 - 5:30
Reception in Call Auditorium Lobby
“Microbial ménage à trois: Autophagy, mTOR and Intracellular
Infection”
4
SPEAKER
9:15 AM
CRAIG ROY
BIOS
Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of Microbial Pathogenesis
Yale University School of Medicine
Craig Roy studied Microbiology at Michigan State University and earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology
and Immunology at Stanford University in 1991. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship
in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine in 1996,
he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and
Microbiology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Roy became a founding member of the Department
of Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale University in 1998 and currently holds the title of Professor
and Vice-Chair. Dr. Roy serves as a section editor for PLoS Pathogens, and as editor for
Infection and Immunity and The Journal of Biological Chemistry. Dr. Roy has received multiple
awards including the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award in 2007, which is the American
Society for Microbiology’s oldest and most prestigious prize.
Dr. Roy’s research focuses on the host-pathogen interface. Using multi-disciplinary approaches
his laboratory has discovered many novel mechanisms that intracellular pathogens use to
modulate host membrane transport pathways, which allow these pathogens to evade cell
autonomous defenses and create novel organelles that permit bacterial replication.
10:00 AM
PETER WALTER
Professor and Chair, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics
University of California, San Francisco
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Peter Walter received his M.S. in Organic Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1977. After
earning his Ph.D. in Cell Biology at The Rockefeller University in 1981, Dr. Walter remained in
the laboratory of Dr. Günter Blobel to complete his post-doctoral studies. He was appointed as
an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at The Rockefeller University in 1982,
then re-located to the University of California, San Francisco in 1983. He is now a Professor
and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and was named an
Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997.
Dr. Walter has been awarded numerous awards throughout his career, including the Virchow
Medal (2004), the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2005), the E.B. Wilson Award (2009), the
Otto Warburg Medal (2011), and the Lasker Award (2014). He was inducted into the American
Academy of Microbiology (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), and the
National Academy of Sciences (2004).
5
11:10 AM
RAMANUJAN HEGDE
Programme Leader
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Ramanujan Hegde earned his M.D. and Ph.D. from UCSF in 1999 before starting his own
laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health. After eleven years at the NIH, he moved his
lab to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2011, where he is currently a Programme
Leader.
Since his first days in graduate school, Manu has been fascinated by the maturation and
quality control of secretory and membrane proteins. His research has two interrelated
goals. The first is to understand the mechanistic principles underlying protein localization
and maturation. The second is to determine how cells deal with inevitable inefficiencies
and errors in these biosynthetic pathways, and the consequences for disease when such
quality control mechanisms fail. The Hegde lab addresses these problems with a variety of
biochemical, cell biological, and structural approaches to identify and functionally reconstitute
the machineries underlying these basic cellular pathways. Highlights from their work include
insights into neurodegenerative disease caused by protein mis-localization, identification of
new pathways for membrane protein insertion and degradation, and structural insights into
the machinery of protein targeting and translocation.
11:55 AM
KEVAN SHOKAT
Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of Cellular and Molecular
Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco
Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of California,
Berkeley
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Dr. Shokat is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and vicechair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of
California at San Francisco. He is also a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the
University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College
in 1986. After receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley with Professor Peter
Schultz, and post-doctoral work in immunology at Stanford University with Professor Chris
Goodnow, Dr. Shokat began his independent research career at Princeton University where
he was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor. He has received numerous awards,
including being named a Fellow of several prestigious research foundations including the
Pew Foundation, Searle Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Glaxo-Wellcome Foundation, and
the Cotrell Foundation. He has also received the Eli Lilly Award, given to the most promising
biological chemist in the country under the age of 37 and the Breslow Award in Biomimetic
Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He was inducted into the National Academy
of Sciences (2010), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (2011).
6
SPEAKER
1:45 PM
HIDDE PLOEGH
BIOS
Professor, Whitehead Institute for Biochemical Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hidde Ploegh was born in the Netherlands and came to the USA to perform the experimental
part of his Ph.D. work in 1977. He returned to Europe in 1980, and after having held positions in
Germany and the Netherlands he joined the faculty of MIT as full professor in 1992. In 1997 he
became the incumbent of the Mallinckrodt Professorship in Immunopathology at Harvard Medical
School and taught both undergraduate and graduate immunology. He returned to MIT in 2005,
where he has been at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Dr. Ploegh was the first to report the successful cloning of a cDNA for a human MHC product.
This work sparked his interest in glycoprotein synthesis and turnover, elements that continue to
figure prominently in current work. He also pioneered the use of HLA transgenic mice to examine
the properties of human MHC products as restriction elements, a thread that continues to this
day through the construction of gene-targeted mice that express Class II MHC-GFP products,
and most recently through the application of somatic cell nuclear transfer to construct new
mouse models for infectious disease. Dr. Ploegh was the first to appreciate the importance of
the intersection between the endocytic pathway and the intracellular trafficking routes of Class
II MHC products as key to antigen presentation. His insights led to the design and synthesis of
small molecules that can be used to selectively perturb these pathways. Recently he has turned
his attention to the use of bacterial sortases as tools to execute transformations on proteins that
are genetically impossible: circular proteins, N-to-N fusions, and C-to-C fusions.
2:30 PM
LINDA PARTRIDGE
Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Director, Institute of Healthy Ageing,
University College London
Linda Partridge received her MA and D. Phil from Oxford University. She then worked for 17 years
at Edinburgh University, before moving to UCL in 1994. She became Director at the Max Planck
Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne in 2008. Her research is directed to understanding the
mechanisms by which healthy lifespan can be extended in laboratory model organisms. Her work
has focused in particular on the role of nutrient-sensing pathways, such as the insulin/insulinlike growth factor signaling pathway, and on dietary restriction. Her current work is directed to
developing pharmacological treatments that ameliorate ageing to produce a broad-spectrum,
preventative medicine for the diseases of human ageing.
7
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ipsen Longevity Prize, the Darwin-Wallace
Medal, the Royal Society Croonian Lecture and a DBE for services to Science. She is a Fellow
of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
3:35 PM
KRISTIN SCOTT
Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Kristin Scott studied Biology at the University of Chicago and earned her Ph.D. in Biology from
the University of California, San Diego in 1998. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in
the lab of Dr. Richard Axel at Columbia University, she was appointed as Assistant Professor
in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in
2003. Dr. Scott became a full Professor in 2012. She has received honors including the Sloan
Award in Neuroscience (2003-2005) and the John Merck Award (2006-2010), and in 2009
was named a HHMI Early Career Scientist.
Dr. Scott’s research aims to understand the neural circuits underlying taste perception in the
Drosophila brain. Her previous studies have led to the identification of different classes of
taste neurons and elucidated the map of different taste modalities in the primary gustatory
region of the fly brain. Dr. Scott’s research currently examines how taste information is
processed higher in the brain to produce perception and behavior.
4:20 PM
CRAIG THOMPSON
President and Chief Executive Officer
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Craig B. Thompson, M.D. is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Dr. Thompson received his B.S. from Dartmouth College
and M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by clinical training in internal medicine
at Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Institute. Dr. Thompson has extensive research experience in cancer, immunology, and
translational medicine. His current research focuses on the regulation of cellular metabolism
during cell growth/differentiation and on the role that metabolic changes play in the origin and
progression of cancer. Previously, he has contributed to the development of new treatments
for autoimmune diseases and leukemia.
Dr. Thompson is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences,
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute.
8
Call Auditorium
(Speaking Events and
Reception)
Trillium,
Kennedy Hall
Synapsis Cafe,
Weill Hall
Lunch
Box lunches will be distributed just outside Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall at the
beginning of the lunch break, scheduled for 12:40 PM. All registered participants with a
name tag may pick up a box lunch.
There are a number of locations nearby Kennedy Hall where you may wish to eat
your lunch. The plaza in front of Bailey Hall and the Big Red Barn would each make
good locations, depending on the weather. You may also go to Trillium (Kennedy Hall)
or Synapsis Cafe (Weill Hall). In addition, extra seating may be found in the Science
Lounges in the Weill Institute (2nd, 3rd and 4th floors of Weill Hall’s South Wing).
10
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT
THE WEILL INSTITUTE FOR
CELL & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY,
please visit:
wicmb.cornell.edu
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lecture hall generously provided by
the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Symposium organized by Hayley Rein Kresock,
Assistant to the Director of the Weill Institute
Photography by University Photography (front cover, 1, 2, 3, 9, back cover) and courtesy of respective Symposium speakers (5, 6, 7, 8).