Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green
Distinguished Visiting Professorship,
Honoring Women in Science and Medicine
Each year the Women in Science and Medicine Advisory Committee (WISMAC) selects and hosts an outstanding female scientist/physician to visit UT Southwestern for a two-day professorship. The Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship, Honoring Women in Science and Medicine was established by the Southwestern Medical Foundation in honor of the late wife of Texas Instruments founder Cecil H. Green, who died in 2003. Mrs. Green, who died in 1986, championed the cause of opening new career paths for women in science and provided a major bequest to Southwestern Medical Foundation. The Visiting Professorship promotes the accomplishments of women in science and medicine and provides inspiration to UT Southwestern's junior faculty and trainees. Our visiting professor meets with individuals and with diverse groups on campus and presents a University Lecture.
2008-2009 Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship
Carol Greider, Ph.D.
University Lecture February 4, 2009: "Telomerase and the Consequences of Telomere Dysfunction"
Carol Greider is the Daniel Nathans Professor and director of the department of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her pre-eminent discovery of the enzyme telomerase and subsequent studies on telomere function in the cell have transformed the fields of aging and cancer research. As a graduate student in the laboratory of Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider first described telomerase in Tetrahymena, a pond-dwelling protozoan containing thousands of chromosomes. She continued on to extensively characterize the functional regions of Tetrahymena telomerase. With colleagues, she established a link between telomere length and replicative capacity of cells, and also provided important insight into the role of aberrant telomerase activity in cancer cells. More recently, Dr. Greider has been characterizing chromosome rearrangments in yeast to explore the genetic requirements for chromosome stability. Her laboratory has also generated telomerase null mice to dissect the role of telomere length in stem cell viability. Dr. Greider's research also has taken a clinical bent in studies of dyskeratosis congenita, a rare, inherited disorder related to stem cell failure.
Dr. Greider earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She began her postdoctoral studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., where she later became an investigator. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1997. Dr. Greider is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards including the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, which she shared with her former mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and with Jack Szostak, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School. [updated December 2008]
2009-2010 Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship
Joan S. Brugge, Ph.D. University Lecture on February 3, 2010
Joan Brugge is the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Brugge graduated with a B.A. in biology from Northwestern University and she received her Ph.D. in virology from the Baylor College of Medicine. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Colorado with Raymond Erikson, she isolated the protein that codes for the viral and cellular forms of the src gene. Currently, Dr. Brugge’s laboratory is investigating normal processes that regulate cell proliferation, survival, and migration during morphogenesis and elucidating how oncogenic insults during tumorigenesis disrupt these processes to the advantage of tumor cells.
Dr. Brugge has held full professorships at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also named as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1992, Dr. Brugge left academia to help launch a new company, ARIAD, to focus on research aimed at developing new drugs targeting signaling pathways in disease. She joined the faculty of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in 1997 and became the Chair in 2004. Dr. Brugge has received several awards recognizing her scientific accomplishments including an NIH Merit Award, an American Cancer Society Research Professorship and the Senior Career Recognition Award from the American Society of Cell Biology and she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. [updated June, 2009]
