Gary Stormo
Department of Genetics, Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology
Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, United States

website: http://stormo.wustl.edu/

Presentation Title: Searching for Signals in Sequences

Presentation Time: Monday, July 22, 4:35 - 5:35

Room: Hall 1
 

 

Abstract

DNA is an information carrying molecule, encoding not only for the RNAs and proteins that perform the functions necessary for cellular and organismal viability, but also encoding the instructions for when, where and under what conditions those functional molecules are expressed. Most of my career has been devoted to studying the signals, cis-regulatory elements, in DNA and RNA that controls various aspects of gene expression. This talk will provide some background on the nature of the signals we seek, some history of approaches to find them, how current technology facilitates the search and where I think the field is headed.

Biography

Gary Stormo is the Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He received his B.S. degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology and his and Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He remained at the University of Colorado as a faculty member in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology until joining the faculty at WUSM in 1999. Beginning with his graduate thesis work he has combined experimental and computational approaches to understanding gene regulation. Most of that work has focused on identifying, modeling and predicting regulatory sites in DNA and RNA and their contributions to regulatory networks that control gene expression in vivo.