October 13, 2005
Third Russell Ross Endowed Lecture on Oct. 17
The third Russell Ross Endowed Lecture will be given by Dr. Brant Weinstein, an expert on the embryonic origins of the vertebrate circulatory system.
He will speak on “Assembly of the Developing Vasculature” at 3 p.m., Monday, Oct. 17, in Turner Auditorium, room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.
Weinstein is senior investigator and head of the Section of Verbebrate Organogenesis at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Laboratory of Molecular Genetics.
He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then did postdoctoral work at Harvard, where he bagan his studies of blood vessel and blood cell development in zebrafish.
Comparatively little is known about the control systems that guide development of the complex circulatory structures. To learn more, the Weinstein lab uses zebrafish, which are transparent for the first few weeks of their lives. With advanced imaging, it is possible to actually watch the development of blood vessels.
The laboratory is particularly known for developing new experimental and genetic tools for these studies, including three-dimensional confocal microangiography, transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent proteins, and mutations that cause patterning defects in vessels.
Many of the processes they study are important in human inherited and acquired diseases.
The lecture is dedicated to the memory and scientific legacy of Dr. Russell Ross, a faculty member from 1965 until his death in 1999 and chair of the School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology from 1982 to 1994.
His significant contributions to vascular biology and his “response-to-injury” hypothesis about the development of atherosclerosis form the basis for much of today’s research work in the field.
