#NYCRNASymposium
Speakers
The program includes two keynote lectures to be given by Jeannie Lee and Joan Steitz. Other speakers will be selected from submitted abstracts.
Jeannie Lee
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Title:
TBD
Jeannie T Lee is The Phillip A. Sharp, PhD, Endowed Chair in Molecular Biology, Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Vice Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Lee specializes in the study of epigenetic regulation by long noncoding RNAs and uses X-chromosome inactivation as a model system. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine, a Harrington Rare Disease Scholar of the Harrington Discovery Institute, a recipient of the Lurie Prize from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, an awardee of the Centennial Prize from the Genetics Society of America, the 2010 Molecular Biology Prize and the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Lee was also named a Distinguished Graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
From 2013-2018, she co-launched the Epigenetics Initiative at Harvard Medical School and served as its Co-Director. She received her A.B. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University, obtained M.D.-Ph.D degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and carried out postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute & MIT.
Joan Steitz
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Title:
​From Lupus to DoGs: Adventures in the RNA World
As a college student in the 1960s, Joan Steitz never imagined herself as a top-flight scientist. Certainly, she was fascinated by science. She even assisted senior scientists in laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was befriended by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. But when it came time to choose a career path, she had never seen a female professor or head of lab. So, she never aspired to such goals.
Today, Prof. Joan Steitz is one of leading scientists in her field. Steitz is best known for her pioneering work in RNA. She and her student Michael Lerner discovered and defined the function of small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA—the earliest product of DNA transcription—and was the first to learn that these cellular complexes (snRNPs) play a key role in processing messenger RNA by excising noncoding regions and splicing together the resulting segments. Her breakthroughs into the previously mysterious splicing process have clarified the science behind the formation of proteins and other biological processes, including the intricate changes that occur as the immune system and brain develop. Steitz earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1967. After completing postdoctoral work in Cambridge, England, she joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale as an assistant professor and later became an associate and full professor, as well as chair of the department.