Weill Institute Symposium

CALL AUDITORIUM KENNEDY HALL

CELL SIGNALING AND MOLECULAR DYNAMICS

OCTOBER 13, 2015

ABOUTTHE WEILL INSTITUTE

Welcome 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.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, Adrienne Roeder, and Haiyuan Yu). Tobias Doerr will join the faculty as an Assistant Professor in July of 2016.

The Weill Institute labs are located within Weill Hall, a state-of-the-art research building dedicated in October

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 also seeks to help disseminate cutting-edge research throughout the Cornell community. By sponsoring and organizing events such as this one, the institute is helping to advance Cornell’s leadership in the life sciences revolution.

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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 “Microbial ménage à trois: Autophagy, mTOR and Intracellular Infection”

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

WEILL INSTITUTE SYMPOSIUM | OCTOBER 13, 2015

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BIOSSPEAKER

9:15 AMCRAIG ROY 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 AMPETER WALTER Professor and Chair, Department of Biochemistry and BiophysicsUniversity of California, San FranciscoInvestigator, 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).

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BIOS 11:10 AM RAMANUJAN HEGDEProgramme LeaderMRC 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 AMKEVAN SHOKAT Professor and Vice-Chair, Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San FranciscoProfessor, Department of Chemistry, University of California, BerkeleyInvestigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Dr. Shokat is currently an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and vice-chair 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).

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BIOSSPEAKER

2:30 PM LINDA PARTRIDGEFounding Director, Max Planck Institute for Biology of AgeingDirector, 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/insulin-like 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.

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.

1:45 PM HIDDE PLOEGH 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.

3:35 PMKRISTIN SCOTTProfessor, Department of Molecular and Cell BiologyUniversity 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 PMCRAIG THOMPSON President and Chief Executive OfficerMemorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Craig B. Thompson, M.D. is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering 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.

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LunchBox 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).

Call Auditorium (Speaking Events and

Reception) Trillium, Kennedy Hall

Synapsis Cafe, Weill Hall

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).