Laboratory Graduates

The cast in order of appearance:

Jeffrey Kant: Jeff was the first post doctoral fellow or a least a hemi-fellow since he was stolen part-time from the Pathology program at the NIH. Jeff worked with Jerry on the cloning of the fibrinogen genes in 1980 and the finding that one gene could give rise to two messages and two proteins by alternative splicing, which in 1980 was news (hard to believe now). Jeff is now a Professor of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dana Fowlkes: Dana worked with Jerry at the NIH and by sequencing the regulatory regions of genes, coordinately regulated during the inflammatory response found the sequence GGGAATTCCC (PNAS 81:2313, 1984) which was later shown to bind NFkB. Dana joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later founded Novalon and left the faculty of UNC to direct the company full-time. In June of 2000, he sold his company to Karo Bio for quite a sum of money. Check the Wall Street Journal for details.

Al Fornace: Al worked with Jerry at the NIH and was the first to define large scale genetic repeats in the mammalian genome (Science 1983). He is now head of the Laboratory of Chemical Carcinogenesis at the NIH in Bethesda.  His e.mail address is: af6z@nih.gov

Nikki Holbrook: Nikki was the person who helped switch the interest of the lab to signaling. She cloned the IL-2 gene and with David Durand defined the regulatory regions of the IL-2 gene. She and David began our march backward through the Ca²⁺/Calcineurin/NF-AT signaling pathway in 1982. Nikki inherited Jerry's laboratory at the NIH when he left and she is now Chief of the Laboratory of Genetics at the NIA, NIH.

Jorge Plutzy: cloned the protein C gene in the lab and studied human variations in the gene during the summers while he was a medical student at the University of North Carolina. He is now an Associate Professor at Harvard.

Michael Lieber: Michael, along with Nikki, initiated the studies on signal transduction in the lab. He is now a Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Molecular Immunology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at USC/Norris Cancer Center in Los Angeles. His e.mail address is: lieber@hsc.usc.edu

David Durand: David joined me when our laboratory moved to Stanford University. He defined the regulatory regions of the IL-2 gene, and with J.P. Shaw discovered the NF-AT transcription complex in 1987. David made the IL-2 luciferase plasmids that have been distributed to thousands of laboratories worldwide. He went from the lab to the University of Vermont and is now a Professor at Stonybrook.

John Morgan came from Balintubber Ireland to the lab and defined the regions of the fibrinogen genes that Gilles later showed bound the HNF-1 transcription factor and used to purify this protein. John is presently at Genelabs in Redwood City.

Gilles Courtois: Gilles discovered HNF-1 in 1985 while a post doctoral fellow in the laboratory and showed that it regulated a wide group of genes expressed in endodermal cells. He is now an Investigator at the Pasteur Institute and can be reached at gmcourt@pasteur.fr

Susanne Baumheuter: Cloned HNF-1a and HNF-1b and went to Genentech for several years before becoming incommunicado.

Paul Utz: worked in the lab as a medical student and named NF-AT. For those of you who hate the name, he is entirely to blame. He joined the faculty at Harvard for a few years before coming to Stanford as an Associate Professor of Medicine.

Jeng-Peng Shaw: with David Durand and Paul Utz discovered NF-AT and implicated it as a regulator of early activation genes in T cells that coordinate the immune response. J-P is now a Scientist at Advanced Medicine, Inc. in South San Francisco.

Jay Toole: worked in the lab during the time he was a medical student at Stanford University after completing the cloning of Factor VIII at Genetics Institute. He is presently Director of Clinical Research at Gilead. His e.mail address is jay_toole@gilead.com

Katharine Ullman: Katie was a graduate student in the laboratory and defined the regions of the IL-2 essential for its activity. She purifed junD as a regulator of IL-2 (Ullman Science 1990) and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Her e.mail address is Katie.Ullman@hci.utah.edu

Dirk Mendel: discovered and cloned DCoH as a cofactor for the actions of HNF-1a and HNF-1b (Science 1991). He is now Associate Director for pre-clinical therapeutics at Sugen in South San Francisco. He can be reached at dirk-mendel@sugen.com.

Beth Emmel: Beth came to our laboratory as a technician from UC Santa Cruz and while in the lab discovered with David Durand that NF-AT was a specific target of cyclosporin and FK506. She went from our lab to Vet School and is now a practicing vet specializing in small animals on the North Shore of Chicago.

Andrew Serafini: was a shared graduate student with the Herzenberg lab. He isolated somatic cell mutations that were not able to activate the cellular CRAC channels and hence demonstrated with Rich Lewis in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology that the CRAC channel was essential for lymphocyte activation. Andrew decided to do patent law and is now working with a firm in Palo Alto.

Steve Fiering: was really a Herzenberg lab graduate student who spent a lot of time in the lab, and with Cor Verweij, developed the NF-AT bgal plasmids that were used for some time for measuring activity in individual cells. He used this technique to show that genes seemed to be in an "off" or "on" state and hence appear to have a qualitative mode of regulation. Steve is now an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, where Jerry did his post doc. His e.mail address is steve.fiering@dartmouth.edu

Calvin Kuo: Calvin was an MD-PhD student in the laboratory and defined the transcriptional hierarchy that Graham Bell's group and others have now shown is mutated in most cases of inherited adult-onset diabetes of the young (MODY) (Nature 355, 457, 1993). He also made the first observation that rapamycin interfered with the pathways that control protein synthesis, an observation that was later shown to underlie the mechanism of action of this drug in both yeast and mammalian cells. This was the critical step in defining a signaling pathway that was later shown to relate membrane signals to translational control. After spending some time at Harvard, Calvin will be coming back to Stanford in November of 2000 as an Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Cor Verweij: Developed the approach of using small binding sites to regulate indicator genes in transgenic mice and showed that NF-AT activity was present in many different cell types (JBC 265, 1990). He is presently a Professor at the University of the Netherlands. He can be reached at verweij@abcoude.com

W. Michael Flanagan: Mike discovered that NF-AT was made up of two components, one (NF-ATc) was cyclosporin-sensitive and cytoplasmic and required calcium for activation. The other component, (NF-ATn) was nuclear and newly induced (Nature 352:803, 1991). Mike also developed the first in vitro transcription system that faithfully reflected the T lymphocyte activation requirements. Mike just took over the leadership of Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals started by Jim Wells in Redwood City.

Linda Hansen: One of the first graduate students in the lab. Linda worked with Dirk Mendel to discover and characterize DcoH. She is now in Colorado with her husband and children.

Neil Clipstone: Neil demonstrated that calcineurin was a key component of the lymphyocyte activation pathway and with Jun Liu, provided the final link in the Ca²⁺/Calcineurin/NF-AT signaling pathway (Nature, 1992). He also developed a way of activating transcription using FK506 to recruit an activation domain to a DNA binding domain (J. Biol. Chem., 1992). This was the first use of the two sides of a single molecule for dimerization and lead the way to the use of rapamycin and related molecules for this same purpose. Neil is presently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern and can be reached at: N-clipstone@nwu.edu

Jamison Nourse: Jami demonstrated that signals through the IL-2 receptor allowed cells to enter the cell cycle by controlling the degradation of p27.  She is now a postdoctoral fellow working in David Morgan's lab at UCSF but is planning to take some time off to stay at home with her two children.

David Spencer: David developed the method for regulating protein-protein interactions with synthetic ligands or Chemical Inducers of Dimerization (CIDs) (Spencer et al Science, 1993). Using this approach, he showed that receptors such as the T cell receptor, the B cell receptor, and the Fas receptor can be regulated by simple proximity. He worked with Tom Wandless, a graduate student in Stuart Schreiberís laboratory on this project. Tom is now an Assistant Professor at Stanford University and David is an Assistant Professor at Baylor University where is continuing to develop this system for gene therapy. David can be reached at dspencer@bcm.tmc.edu

Jeffrey Northrop: Jeff developed the method for purifing NF-AT and later cloned NF-ATc1 and NF-ATc2 with Luika Timmerman. He and Luika also showed that NF-ATc family members shuttled into and out of the nucleus and that this shuttling allowed the discrimination of the Ca²⁺ signals originating from CRAC channels from those originating at IP3-gated intracellular channels. Jeff is presently working at Affymax and can be reached at Jeff_Northrop@qmgates.affymax.com

Paul Khavari: was a graduate student in the lab after completing a medical residency at Yale. Paul started the work on the interface between chromatin and signaling in the lab and was the first to isolate a subunit of the mammalian BAF or hSWI/SNF complex. He is now an Associate Professor at Stanford University and can be reached at khavari@cmgm.stanford.edu

Steffan Ho: Steffan developed the method of regulating transcription with synthetic ligands (Nature 382, 822, 1996) which was later taken up by Ariad and Jim Wilson's gene therapy group and used for the first regulated effective gene therapy in primates. In addition, Steffan cloned NF-ATc1, c2 and NF-ATc3 with Jeff Northrop. Finally Steffan found that calicheamicin oligosaccharide bound to the NF-AT site in DNA and was an effective antagonist. Steffan is presently an Assistant Professor at UCSD and can be reached at snho@ucsd.edu

Richard Bram: came to the lab after finishing his residency in Pediatrics. Rick defined the active cyclophilins and based on this information cloned the CAML protein that modulates Ca²⁺ influx in response to signals. Rick went to St Jude Research Institute after leaving the lab and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. He can be reached at bramr@mayo.edu

Chan Beals: Chan along with Neil Clipstone defined the mechanism of nuclear export of the NF-ATc1 protein by first defining mutations that prevented nuclear export and then purifying the kinases that specifically phosphorylate these sites. He found that GSK3 phosphorylates the specific sites after relatively non-specific kinases primed the protein for phosphorylation by GSK3. Chan returned to his home state of Washington where he now works for ICOS and can be reached at cbeals@icos.com

Leslie Holsinger: Leslie found that the VAV exchange factor for rac was required for formation of the CAP or SMAC signaling complex on lymphocytes. In addtion, she used synthetic ligands to demonstrate that the SOS exchange factor could be activated by membrane proximity. She now works at Sugen in South San Francisco as a Scientist in phosphatase research and can be reached at leslie-holsinger@sugen.com

Weidong Wang: cloned nearly all of the components of the mammalian SWI/SNF or BAF complex and with Keji Zhao found that it contained an actin like gene and also b actin. Weidong is presently a Senior Investigator at the Laboratory of Genetics, NIA, NIH. He can be reached at wangw@grc.nia.nih.gov

Juli Klemm: developed the system for using synthetic ligands to regulate the export and hence inactivation of nuclear proteins. Her assay has proved to be a useful way of testing nuclear localization sequences She went to work at Incyte after leaving the lab and now has her own group there. She can be reached at jklemm@incyte.com

David Fiorentino: David was a MD/PhD student in the lab and studied the mechanism of action of the Tor signaling pathway in yeast, which is blocked by rapamycin. He is presently at Stanford University doing a Residency in Dermatology. His e.mail address is fiorski@leland.stanford.edu

Roger Briesewitz: Roger developed a general method for making small molecule antagonists of protein function, based on a generalization of the mechanism of action of CsA and FK506. He is presently a scientist at Advanced Medicine, Inc. located in South San Francisco. His e.mail is rbriesewitz@advmedicine.com

Luika Timmerman: Luika was a graduate student in the lab and made an important contribution to the understanding of the mechanism of discrimination of calcium signals when she showed that the rapid export of the NF-ATc family of transcription factors underlies the ability to distinguish between calcium currents derived from the IP3 receptor and the cell membrane CRAC channel (Nature 1996). She is presently a postdoctoral fellow in Frank McCormick's laboratory at the Cancer Research Institute at UCSF.  She can be reached at timmerma@cc.ucsf.edu

Kurt Vogel: Kurt is a chemist who came to the lab to work with the development of new synthetic ligands. Kurt is now a Staff Scientist at Maxygen in Redwood City. His e.mail address is Kurt.Vogel@maxygen.com

Keji Zhao: Keji was the first person to discover actin in a chromatin remodeling complex and, in addition, showed along with Ollie Rando that PIP2 controlled the nuclear localization of the SWI/SNF-like BAF chromatin remodeling complex. Keji is now a Senior Scientist at the NIH, NHLDI, Lab of Molecular Immunology and can be reached at Zhaok@NHLBI.NIH.gov

Stephen Biggar: Steve developed a technique that allows in vivo order-of-addition and accompanying experiments in living cells and used this powerful technique to investigate the mechanism of transcriptional silencing. Steve has decided not to pursue scientific research and/or clinical medicine and has joined Baker/Tisch Investments in New York City as an Associate Venture Capitalist. His e.mail is sbiggar@loews.com