Student Posters - MBES Program White House
Keynote Talk - S.C. Dept of Natural Resources Auditorium
Fort Johnson Campus
PHOTO GALLERY

     

 

 Keynote speaker: Dr. Terry Gaasterland
 Professor of Computational Biology
University of California, San Diego,
Director of the Scripps Genome Center,
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

 Title: "Regulating the regulators: the impact of alternative splicing and microRNAs on control of transcription"
 

 
Terry Gaasterland is Professor of Computational Biology at the University of California, San Diego and the Director of the Scripps Genome Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Before her position in San Diego, she was Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Computational Genomics at The Rockefeller University in New York City. She holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Russian from Duke University (1984) and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland (1988 and 1992, respectively). From May
1984 to January 1988, she worked as a software engineer for Texas Instruments. After completing her doctoral studies, Dr. Gaasterland held a DOE Enrico Fermi Fellowship in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and after two years was promoted to Assistant Scientist. In January 1995, she also became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Gaasterland has received numerous awards and fellowships in recognition of her research. These have included the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1999-2002), the Burroughs-Wellcome New Investigator Award (2000-2003), the Presidential Early Career Award in Science & Engineering (2000), New York's "40 under 40" in 2002, and the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science in 2003. She has been an Associate in the Evolutionary Biology Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 1996.

In her research, Terry Gaasterland aims to create and use new software tools to explore the unfolding world of genomes. The tools built in her laboratory compare genome sequence data from different organisms to identify genes, to find new types of genes, and to understand which genes regulate which other genes. Mis-expression of genes in certain tissues often correlates with disease states and provides insight into the disease process. To find mis-expressed genes associated with disease, Dr. Gaasterland first compares how genes are normally used in different tissues and at different timepoints. Normal expression patterns are compared with disease expression patterns to find mis-expressed genes.