Keynote Speakers
Hashim M. Al-Hashimi
Al-Hashimi was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Greece, Italy, Jordan, and the UK. As a graduate student at Yale University, Al-Hashimi helped develop residual dipolar coupling methodology, which revolutionized the study of protein structure and dynamics by NMR. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he expanded the domain of applicability of these methods to nucleic acids. As a principal investigator, Al-Hashimi and his trainees discovered many of the ubiquitous motional modes underlying the biological activities of nucleic acids, with important implications for drug discovery and for understanding the mechanisms that cause genome instability and cancer. These motions include transitions between Watson-Crick and Hoogsteen base pairs, which shape the DNA protein recognition and damage landscapes; transitions between mismatch and tautomeric/anionic Watson-Crick base pairs, which are responsible for errors during replication, transcription, and translation; motions that determine proper folding of RNA; and transient changes in RNA secondary structure that underlie gene regulation and viral genomic replication by non-coding RNAs. His group developed methods harnessing the predictive power of RNA dynamic ensembles to identify small molecule inhibitors of HIV-1 replication. In 2009, Al-Hashimi co-founded Base4 Inc to enable RNA-targeted drug discovery using RNA dynamics. Al-Hashimi is the Roy & Diana Vagelos Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Associate Dean for Biomedical Graduate Education, and Director of Vagelos Institute Biomedical Research Education (VIBRE) at Columbia University.
Juli Feigon
Feigon received her B.A. from Occidental College and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Her postdoctoral work was completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty in 1985, and she is a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and holds the Christopher Foote Term Chair. Feigon pioneered the use of NMR to determine structures and dynamics of DNA and RNA. As a graduate student, she used correlation NMR spectroscopy to investigate the interactions of >90 different drugs with DNA and published the first two-dimensional FT NMR spectra of DNA duplexes. During her postdoctoral work, she used NMR to study the conversion of B-DNA to Z-DNA, correlating resonances in one of the first examples of exchange spectroscopy applied to macromolecules. Her early work as a faculty member at UCLA was seminal in defining the conformational variability of DNA. She published the first structures of DNA triplexes, quadruplexes, and aptamers, and her work has provided fundamental insights into DNA A-tract and protein induced bending, cation interactions with DNA, Hoogsteen base pairs, and drug binding to DNA. In the mid-1990s she turned her attention to RNA folding and function, including studies of RNA aptamers, ribozymes, and riboswitches, and recognition of RNA by proteins. For all this work, she has developed new NMR methods and applications. Her most recent work employs hybrid methods of NMR, X-ray crystallography, and electron microscopy along with biochemistry to study structure, dynamics, and function of RNA and RNA-protein complexes, and for the past decade a major focus of her laboratory has been on telomerase structure and function.
Presenters
Dave Brow – Professor, UW–Madison
Jordan Burke – Director, Guardant Health
Jared Davis – President and CTO Northern RNA
Allison Didychuk – Assistant Professor, Yale University
Aaron Hoskins – Professor, UW–Madison
Ci Ji Lim – Associate Professor, UW–Madison
Scott Kennedy – Professor, Harvard University
Joel McManus – Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Eric Montemayor – R&D, Luminex
Katie Mouzakis – Associate Professor, Loyola Marymount University
Riley Petersen – Postdoctoral Fellow, Medical College of Wisconsin
Chad Rienstra – Professor, UW–Madison
Nick Reiter – Associate Professor, Marquette University
Dipa Sashital – Professor, Iowa State University
David Staple – Attorney, Casimir-Jones
Nathan Sherer – Professor, UW–Madison
Chris Trotta – Senior Vice President, PTC Therapeutics
Vincenzo Venditti – Associate Professor, Iowa State University
Yun-Xing Wang – Chief and Senior Investigator, NCI-Frederick