Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Fellowship Program - Celebrating 15 Years of Opportunity and Discovery

3:00 - 4:30 p.m. Stamp Student Union, room TBA

Speakers and talk titles:

Daniel Shriner, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Departments of Nutrition Sciences and Biostatistics
University of Alabama at Birmingham
"Developing a Comprehensive Research Toolkit"

Leor Weinberger, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
University of California, San Diego
"Design Principles from Viral Genetic Circuits: Complexity, Feedback, and Transcriptional Noise (and what these tell us about development and cancer at the single-cell level)"

Matthew D. Disney, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York
"Developing Methods to Enable the Rational Design of Small Molecules Targeting RNA"

 

Dr. Daniel Shriner is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland with a B.S. in Microbiology. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey DeStefano. In 1994 he was awarded an HHMI Undergraduate Research Fellowship for his work on HIV replication and recombination. In 2003, Dr. Shriner received his Ph.D. from the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington, where he was he was an HHMI Predoctoral Fellow in Biological Sciences. His graduate work in the laboratory of Dr. James I. Mullins addressed population genetics of HIV, during which time he transitioned from molecular biology to computational biology. Following two brief postdoctoral projects at the University of Washington, he became a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biostatistics, Section on Statistical Genetics, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2005. He currently studies the genetics of obesity and developing methods for statistical genetic and statistical genomic analyses.

Early in Dr. Leor Weinberger's academic career, he became interested in using quantitative and computational approaches to solve fundamental problems in biology and biomedicine. During his undergraduate years, he focused on research at the interface between biology and the physical sciences, including membrane biophysics (with Dr. Marco Colombini at UMD), phyllotaxis (with Dr. Todd Cooke at UMD), liquid crystal pattern formation (with Dr. Victor Steinberg at the Weizmann Institute), hyphal tip growth (with Dr. Herbert Levine at UCSD Physics), and mathematical biology (with Dr. Alan Perelson at Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute). To integrate wet-lab experiment into his work, he chose to do his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in the multi-disciplinary Biophysics program. His research focused on computational design of a novel anti-HIV “designer-virus” therapy and experimentally demonstrating that stochastic gene expression could influence a phenotype in a mammalian system: HIV. For his post-doctoral training he returned to molecular biology and virology with the quantitative analysis tools he had acquired. As a Lewis Thomas Fellow at Princeton University with Dr. Tom Shenk, he developed single-cell imaging and spectroscopy approaches to study HIV and herpesvirus regulation and to elucidate novel transcriptional circuitry. He also participated in teaching a new course with Dr. David Botstein at the Lewis-Sigler Institute that coupled theoretical and experimental approaches. He is currently at the University of California, San Diego where he and his colleagues are developing a vibrant program to train students at the interface of single-cell experiments and quantitative theory.

Dr. Matthew Disney was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 1997 with a B.S. in Chemistry. During his last two years at Maryland, he conducted undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Jeff Davis, where he studied the molecular recognition of metals by self-assembled complexes of isoguanosine. This research made an indelible mark on him; his interest in molecular recognition was piqued then and remains with him to this day. He did graduate work in Dr. Doug Turner’s lab at the University of Rochester, where he studied molecular recognition of RNAs composed of the standard RNA bases. He developed methods to recognize specifically pathogenic RNAs with oligonucleotides and to improve predictions of RNA secondary structure from sequence. Subsequently, he pursued postdoctoral research in Peter Seeberger’s lab, first at MIT and then at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. There, he helped develop carbohydrate microarray platforms to understand the roles of sugars in biological systems. He is currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Chemistry and the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. His group’s research is focused in developing general methods to target RNA with small molecules for therapeutics or probes of function.

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