Leadership Breakfast

8:00 - 10:00 a.m. in the Atrium of the Stamp Student Union - by invitation, see below*

The Leadership Breakfast brings together leaders from the corporate sector, governmental agencies, and universities. This year's open discussion will be on:
Autoimmune and Autoinflammatory Diseases: New Insights and Therapies

Panel Discussion Participants and talk titles:

John O'Shea, M.D.
Scientific Director, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) Intramural Research Program
Chief, Molecular Immunology and Inflammation Branch
National Institutes of Health
Title: New Paradigms in T cell differentiation

Daniel Kastner, M.D., Ph.D.
Clinical Director, NIAMS Intramural Research Program
Chief, Genetics and Genomics Branch
National Institutes of Health
Title: Fevers, Genes, and Pathways: Adventures in the Genetics of Inflammation

Richard Siegel, M.D., Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Immunoregulation Group
Autoimmunity Branch
National Institutes of Health
Title: Lymphocyte life and death in the Fas lane: Bedside to Bench – and back

*Corporate, government, and university leaders who are interested in an invitation to attend this breakfast should contact Gene Ferrick at gene@umd.edu or 301-405-7016.

John O'Shea, M.D. is Scientific Director of NIAMS and Chief of the Molecular Immunology and Inflammation Branch. He received his M.D. from the University of Cincinnati and training in Internal Medicine from SUNY-Upstate. He came to the NIH to do a clinical fellowship in Allergy and Immunology and postdoctoral work in immunology. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Allergy/Immunology. He started an independent laboratory in the National Cancer Institute and later moved to the NIAMS. He is a member of the American Association of Physicians, American Society of Clinical Investigation, American Association of Immunologists and the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He previously served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Biology Chemistry and is currently on the editorial board of Immunity and the Journal of Experimental Medicine. He has published more than 200 articles and book chapters.

Dr. Daniel Kastner received his A.B. degree summa cum laude in philosophy from Princeton University and his M.D., Ph.D. with honor from Baylor College of Medicine. During his graduate studies with Dr. Robert R. Rich, Dan was the first to demonstrate cytotoxic T-lymphocytes directed against the MHC-associated Qa-1 molecule. Dan's career at the NIH began as a Rheumatology Fellow with Dr. Alfred D. Steinberg, studying B-cells in lupus mice. Later in his fellowship, Dan's research interests shifted towards the genetic basis of human rheumatic disease. By the time that he was appointed a Senior Investigator in the Arthritis and Rheumatism Branch of NIAMS, he had begun a project to identify the gene for familial Mediterranean fever by positional cloning. In 1992 his laboratory mapped the susceptibility locus to chromosome 16p, and in 1997 this work culminated in the identification of the FMF gene as a novel inflammatory regulator expressed in granulocytes. Two years later Dan's lab discovered that a dominantly inherited periodic fever syndrome similar to FMF is caused by mutations in the p55 TNF-receptor, a result that has led to the successful use of anti-TNF agents in this disorder. More recently his group played an important role in the identification of mutations in CIAS1 associated with neonatal onset multisystem inflammatory disease (NOMID). Dan is the recipient of a number of awards, including the NIH Director's Award, the Paul Klemperer Award of the New York Academy of Medicine, the Lee C. Howley Prize for Research in Arthritis from the National Arthritis Foundation, and the NIAMS Mentoring Award.

Richard Siegel's interest in immunology and apoptosis began in the late 1980's at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he was an M.D., Ph.D. student. Working with Mark Greene and John Reed, he studied the influence of bcl-2 on T cell apoptosis and repertoire selection. He trained in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and moved to the NIH in 1996 to do postdoctoral training with Michael Lenardo in the Laboratory of Immunology in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, at the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA). There he studied apoptosis signaling and the molecular basis of its impairment in patients with inherited mutations in Fas/CD95 and the Autoimmune Lymphoproliferative Syndrome (ALPS). In 2001, Dr. Siegel moved to the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal Diseases and Skin at the NIH as a tenure-track investigator. His current research interests include regulation of cellular survival and death in the immune system by TNF receptor and other signaling pathways, and the relevance of these pathways to autoimmune diseases and immune tolerance. He also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and is active in the Penn-NIH immunology, NIH-Oxford, and NIH-Cambridge Graduate Partnership Ph.D. Training programs. Since 2006, he has directed the NIH intramural MD/PHD partnership program, a new program that enables MD/PhD students from around the country to their research training at the NIH.