The department of Cell and Developmental Biology held its Sixth Annual Retreat on April 22, 2008 at Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, TN.  Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and lab personnel spent the day in a relaxing atmosphere learning about reserach projects in our member labs.

The keynote speaker Kathryn Anderson, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Developmental Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center gave a stimulating presentation regarding her research on the use of a genetic approach to identify new genes that control important events in early mouse embryogenesis.

There were 215 CDB members in attendance and 91 posters presented. A survey was taken via Survey Monkey after the retreat. We’ve received very positive feedback.

Abel Alcazar-Roman initiated his research in Dr. Susan Wente’s lab in 2003 and completed his Ph.D. in 2007. Abel is the first author of a landmark paper (Alcazar-Roman et al., 2006, Nature. Cell Biology 8, 711-716) that describes a long standing mystery of how the small molecule inositol hexaphosphate regulates RNA transport from the cell nucleus. Abel has served as President of the CDB Graduate Student Association and taken the initiative to help other young Peruvian students identify US labs for research studies. Dr. Alcazar-Roman will join Pietro DeCamilli’s lab at Yale as a postdoctoral fellow.

Dawn Clifford Hart has been a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Kathy Gould since 2004. Dawn is the recipient of a highly competitive NRSA Individual Fellowship for postdoctoral research. Her work in the Gould lab has addressed key questions in cell cycle control and cytokinesis and resulted in publications in high profile journals (e.g., J. Cell Biology). Dr. Hart with join the faculty of Grand Valley State University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2008.