April 25, 2002
Burroughs Wellcome Fund Lecture
Dr. Leslie Leinwand, professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will be at the UW Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, as a Burroughs Wellcome Fund visiting professor. Her visit is hosted by the School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology and the Center for Cardiovascular Biology. Her faculty host is Dr. Charles Murry, associate professor of pathology.
Her visit will have several elements, including advising faculty here on program development in cardiovascular research, interacting with students and discussing their career options, and delivering a public lecture on her own research.
For the public lecture, she will speak on “Molecular Pathways of Cardiac and Skeletal Muscle Adaptation” at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 30, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center.
Leinwand is a highly respected cardiac biologist whose work is important to basic scientists and clinical physicians. Trained as a molecular geneticist, she is an expert in fundamental genetic processes. In the 1980s her interests turned to the biology of heart and skeletal muscle, and by the 1990s, she was focusing on the genetics and molecular physiology of cardiomyopathies, or diseases of the heart muscle.
This focus on heart muscle disease has required a multidisciplinary approach, involving molecular biology, mouse genetics, mouse cardiac physiology and the analysis of human tissues. In Boulder, she has brought together a highly collaborative group including basic scientists and clinical cardiologists, who conduct one of the most successful cardiac research programs in the country.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, which sponsors the lecture, provides support to several universities around the country to bring visiting professors from other institutions as consultants and speakers. The program is administered by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
