Current Protocols Editorial Board: Molecular Biology

Current Protocols Web Advisory Panel

 

Frederick M. Ausubel
Frederick M. Ausubel is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Ernst Winnacker Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Ausubel received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. Formerly, he was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology at Harvard University.

Dr. Ausubel’s scientific work concerns host-microbe interactions. In the 1970s and 1980s, his laboratory worked on the molecular basis of symbiotic nitrogen fixation, the process by which legumes, in concert with a bacterial symbiont, convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Currently, the laboratory is investigating microbial pathogenesis and host defense in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The laboratory has also adopted a genomics approach to study virulence in the opportunistic bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain PA14, which remarkably is a “multi-host” pathogen of both plants and animals. The laboratory is particularly interested in those aspects of pathogenesis and the host innate immune response that have been conserved in evolution.

Dr. Ausubel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. In addition to serving on a variety of editorial boards, Dr. Ausubel is founding editor of the widely-read Current Protocols in Molecular Biology.

From: http://ccib.mgh.harvard.edu/founders-ausubel.htm

Roger Brent
Roger was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1955. He received a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1973, where he did some work attempting to apply AI techniques to protein folding. He went on to get a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1982 for studies with Mark Ptashne. As a graduate student, he showed that the E. coli lexA gene repressed genes involved in the response to radiation damage, cloned the gene, produced and purified its protein product using and in some cases extending the newly developed recombinant DNA methods, and studied binding of the repressor to its operators, showing that its differential binding affinity for these sites affected the timing of the response. As a postdoctoral fellow, also with Mark Ptashne, he tested a number of ideas about the mechanism of transcription regulation in yeast by using the prokaryotic LexA protein and in subsequent experiments creating chimeric proteins that carried LexA fused to activators native to yeast. These "domain swap" experiments established the modular nature of eukaryotic transcription regulators.

In 1985, Roger became a Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics. He and his coworkers used yeast transcription that depended on chimeric DNA bound proteins as a genetic probe for protein function in higher organisms. This work led to the development of working two-hybrid methods (1988-1993), to the ability to scale them up via interaction mating (1992-1994), and to the eventual development of protein interaction methods as a useful way to learn more about biological function. In parallel, Roger and his coworkers developed peptide aptamers as reverse "genetic" agents to study the function of proteins and allelic protein variants (1999-2001), and, more recently, as dominant forward "genetic" reagents to identify genes and pathway linkages in organisms, such as human cells, that are intractable to classical genetic analysis. (Perhaps as important as the actual technologies is the coeval development of ideology (e.g. doctrine) for using them.) This work is described in about 80 research papers and reviews.

In parallel to his academic work, Roger is a longtime (since 1984) advisor to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. He served on the SAB of American Home Products (Genetics Institute/Wyeth Ayerst Research), chairs scientific advisory boards for several smaller companies, and does significant ad hoc consulting work in genomics and computational biology. He is one of the founders (1987-2001) of Current Protocols, including Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, a "how to clone it" manual, which is updated every three months and has about 10,000 subscribing labs. He is founder and organizer (since 1994) of the "After the Genome" workshops. He is an inventor on 11 issued and several pending US Patents. Since the middle 1990s, he has exhorted and advised various bodies in the US and abroad on functional genomics and computational biology, including the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other parts of the US Defense Department.

Roger joined the Molecular Sciences Institute in 1998 as Associate Director. He was named Director in 2000 and President and CEO in 2001. Brent joined the faculty of UCSF Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences as an Adjunct Professor in 2000 and was named a Senior Scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation in 2001.

From http://www.molsci.org/about/people/rbrent.html

Robert E. Kingston
Dr. Bob Kingston is Chief of the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor and Vice Chair of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Kingston earned his PhD at the Universiy of California, Berkeley and went on to train with Dr. Philip Sharp at MIT studying mammalian transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. After establishing his laboratory at MGH in 1985, he developed a program to study the impact of chromatin structure on transcriptional regulation. His group has played key roles in discovering the complexes that regulate the packaging of the mammalian genome into chromatin and thereby impose proper expression of master regulatory genes during mammalian development. He has organized numerous international meetings on transcriptional regulation and on chromatin structure, has served as an Editor of the journal Molecular and Celullular Biology and is currently a member of several editorial boards. He has been actively involved in graduate education via the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard, having twice been awarded the student-voted teaching award and having served as head of the program from 2004 to 2007. His current research focus is to characterize the precise changes in the structure of the human genome that occur to allow proper development of embryonic stem cells, in particular to develop and apply novel methods that characterize changes in chromatin structure across large regions of the human genome and that identify the protein and RNA molecules that bind and regulate key regions of the genome.

David D. Moore
Prof. Moore received his PhD in 1979 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco. He was a faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School for 16 years, and since 1997 has been Professor of Cellular and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. He studies the functions of nuclear hormone receptors and has authored more than 150 publications. He holds 10 patents and has been a founder of 3 biotechnology companies.

Website:
http://www.bcm.edu/genetics/faculty/index.html

J.G. Seidman
Dr. Jonathan Seidman is the Henrietta B. and Frederick H. Bugher Foundation Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University (’72) and his Ph.D. degree form the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His postdoctoral studies were carried out in Dr. Philip Leder’s laboratory at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He has been a member of the Genetics Department, Harvard Medical School since 1981. Over the past ten years his research has been directed towards understanding the molecular basis and epidemiology of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy and congenital heart disease.

Dr. Seidman is a member of The Genetics Society of America and the American Society of Human Genetics. He has received several awards including the Gill Heart Institute Award for Outstanding Contributions to Cardiovascular Research (2000), the 12th Annual Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cardiovascular Research (2002) jointly with Christine Seidman, MD and the Lefoulon-Delalande Foundation, Grand Prix for Science (2007) joint recipient with Christine Seidman, MD. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science (2007) and the Institutes of Medicine (2007)

Website:
http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/~seidman/

John A. Smith
Professor John A. Smith received his M.D. from the University of Missouri-School of Medicine and Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. He was a resident in pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a fellow in medicine at the Robert B. Brigham and Massachusetts General Hospitals. He is Professor of Pathology and Director of the Division of Laboratory Medicine at University of Alabama at Birmingham. His past research has dealt with protein/peptide science, biophysical chemistry, immune recognition, bioinformatics, molecular biology, clinical chemistry, and clinical operations research. He is the author of 168 original papers and reviews, as well as co-editor of 7 books. He is past vice president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was selected as a Distinguished Young Physician by the University of Missouri Medical Alumni Organization. He received a D.Sc. (honoris causa) from Purdue University.

Website:
http://138.26.61.118/depts/MEB/SOMResearchFaculty/currentfacultydata.asp?ID=jasmith

Kevin Struhl
Kevin Struhl received his PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford University in 1979. He has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 1982, and is currently the David Wesley Gaiser Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. His research over the past 30 years combines molecular, genetic, biochemical, and genomic approaches to elucidate molecular mechanisms of gene regulation in eukaryotic organisms. He has published over 200 journal articles, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Website: http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dms/bbs/fac/struhl.html