Susan Gasser to give Max Birnstiel Lecture
The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) cordially invites you to attend the talk
‘Organizing and stabilizing genomes through heterochromatic and euchromatic domains’
By Susan Gasser
Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI), Basel
Date: Wed., 20 March 2019, 11.00 a.m.
Venue: IMP Lecture Hall, Campus-Vienna-Biocenter 1, 1030 Vienna
Susan Gasser studies how nuclear organization impinges on mechanisms of repair and replication fork stability and on epigenetic inheritance of cell fate decisions. She exploits the genetics of model organisms, as well as quantitative live fluorescence imaging.
Gasser’s laboratory identified mechanisms that tether telomeres and silent chromatin at the nuclear envelope. In parallel, they identified roles for RecQ helicases, checkpoint kinases and ORC in the maintenance of genome integrity. Over the last 10 years she has examined the role of nuclear organization and heterochromatin in the development of the nematode, C. elegans. Her laboratory has contributed crucially to our understanding of signals and anchors involved in chromatin positioning, both for active and inactive genes, and for various types of DNA double strand break repair.
Susan Gasser has authored more than 250 scientific articles and reviews, and has received a number of awards for her work, including election to the Académie de France, to the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award 2012, the Weizmann Institute Women in Science award 2013, the INSERM International Prize in 2011, and both the Otto Naegeli Award and the Gregor Mendel Medal in 2006. She was a member of the President’s Science and Technology Advisory Council of the European Commission, and serves on scientific review panels for institutes across Europe. From 2004 until recently, she was director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute. As a doctoral student of the late Jeff Schatz, contact points with the IMP have occurred from an early stage of Gasser’s stellar scientific career.
For this Max Birnstiel Lecture, Gasser was invited by IMP Group Leader Luisa Cochella.
About the Max Birnstiel Lectures
The Max Birnstiel Lectures are a special series of seminars at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna. They are named after the founding director of the institute, Max L. Birnstiel, who passed away in 2014. Each year, five to six scientists are invited to deliver one of these lectures. Previous lecturers are distinguished leaders in their respective fields among them a number of Nobel Prize laureates. The Max Birnstiel Lectures attract considerable attention in the wider scientific community and invariably draw a large audience to the IMP.
Programme of the Max Birnstiel Lectures
www.imp.ac.at/seminars/max-birnstiel-lecture-series
Videos of past Max Birnstiel Lectures
https://www.imp.ac.at/research/lectures-seminars/max-birnstiel-lecture-videos/