Mass General Center for Regenerative Medicine Scientific Advisory Board Members.
Joan S. Brugge joined the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in July, 1997. Prior to this time, she was the Scientific Director of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Cambridge, MA. From 1989 to 1992, Dr. Brugge was a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. From 1979 to 1988, Dr. Brugge was on the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, most recently as Professor of Microbiology. She received her B.A. in biology from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in Virology from Baylor College of Medicine and completed postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado Medical Center.
Connie Cepko is a Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She trained in virology with Phil Sharp at MIT for a PhD and later with Richard Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She helped develop retroviral vectors for transduction into the nervous system for lineage analysis and for studies of gene function in vivo. Her laboratory has focused on the topic of cell fate determination in the retina through the analysis of the behavior of progenitor and stem cells. More recently, they have been studying the mechanisms of photoreceptor death in diseases that cause blindness, such as retinitus pigmentosa and macular degeneration.
Bob Kingston is Chief of the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor and Vice Chair of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Kingston began working on bacterial transcription mechanism in 1977 as a student with Dr. Michael Chamberlin at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his PhD in 1981 and was awarded a Jane Coffin Childs fellowship to train with Dr. Philip Sharp at MIT on mammalian transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. After establishing his laboratory at MGH in 1985, he developed a program to study the impact of chromatin structure on transcriptional regulation. His group has played key roles in discovering the complexes that regulate the packaging of the mammalian genome into chromatin and thereby impose proper expression of master regulatory genes during mammalian development. He has organized numerous international meetings on transcriptional regulation and on chromatin structure, has served as an Editor of the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology and is currently a member of several editorial boards. He has been actively involved in graduate education via the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard, having twice been awarded the student-voted teaching award and having served as head of the program from 2004 to 2007. His current research focus is to characterize the precise changes in the structure of the human genome that occur to allow proper development of embryonic stem cells, in particular to develop and apply novel methods that characterize changes in chromatin structure across large regions of the human genome and that identify the protein and RNA molecules that bind and regulate key regions of the genome.
Richard Maas is currently Professor of Medicine in the Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School (HMS), Affiliate Member of the HMS Dept. of Genetics and of the Harvard-M.I.T. Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He received his A.B. degree in 1976 from Dartmouth College magna cum laude with high distinction in chemistry. He received his M.D., Ph.D. degrees, the latter in molecular pharmacology with Dr. John Oates, from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1984 where he studied arachidonic acid biochemistry and leukotriene biosynthesis. Following residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he conducted postdoctoral studies with Dr. Philip Leder in the HMS Dept. of Genetics on genes involved in vertebrate development before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989. From 1999 to 2007, he was Chief of the BWH Genetics Division, a position he relinquished in order to assume the position of Director of SysCODE, “Systems-based Consortium for Organ Design and Engineering,” one of nine Consortia funded under the NIH Road Map Interdisciplinary Research Program. The goal of SysCODE is to use principles of developmental biology, genomics and computational biology, and tissue engineering to build organ parts from stem cells.
Dr. Sanes received a B.A. from Yale, where he was Scholar of the House. He earned a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard in 1976. Following postdoctoral work at UCSF, he joined the faculty of Washington University, where he served on the faculty for over 20 years and held an Endowed Chair of Neurobiology. He returned to Harvard in 2004 as Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and founding Director of the Center for Brain Science. Dr. Sanes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the Alden Spencer Award of Columbia University, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NIH), the Council of the Society for Neuroscience, and advisory panels for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Association, the Klingenstein Neuroscience Fund, the Searle Scholars Fund, the Stowers Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Cliff Tabin is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Adjunct Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at MIT in 1984, and did postdoctoral fellowships at the Department of Biochemistry at Harvard University and the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1989. His research on the genetic basis for embryological development has been widely recognized and he won the Annual Prize in Molecular Biology from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition, he is the Director of the Embryology and Genetics course to first year Medical Students at Harvard. He has won 7 teaching awards for his class including the 2002 Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is also co-director of the Graduate Program at Harvard Medical School. Since 2000, he has been directing the efforts at Harvard Medical School to assist the establishment of KUMS. Since 2002, he has been a member of the Board of the ANMF, continuing to coordinate efforts on behalf of KUMS under their auspices.
