YCCI’s 3rd Annual All Scholar Day Retreat is slated for Tuesday, April 1st at the Anlyan Center. This half-day event is open to all students, trainees, scholars and faculty at Yale who are participating or interested in clinical or translational research. The event begins at noon with a poster session and lunch in the foyer of TAC. This year, we are very excited that Christopher P. Austin, MD, director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will be speaking. He will be joined by Richard Flavell, PhD, FRS, founding chair of the Department of Immunobiology. To register click here.
Prior to his appointment in 2012 by NIH director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, Christopher Austin served as director of the NCATS Division of Pre-Clinical Innovation. He is leading NCATS in its mission to catalyze the generation of innovative methods and technologies that will enhance the development, testing and implementation of diagnostics and therapeutics across a wide range of diseases and conditions. Austin came to NIH in 2002 from Merck, where his work focused on genome-based discovery of novel targets and drugs. He began his NIH career as the senior advisor to the director for translational research at the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he initiated the Knockout Mouse Project and the Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. He has also served as director of the Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Disease program and the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, and as scientific director of the NIH Center for Translational Therapeutics. At NCATS, Austin is applying his experience across the spectrum of the research pipeline to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate innovative technologies and paradigms that increase the efficiency of translation and speed the discovery and delivery of interventions that improve human health.
Richard Flavell is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Early in his career he worked with Charles Weissmann in Zurich to modify genes in a virus and studied the resulting phenotype - the first example of what scientists now call “reverse genetics.” Subsequently, as a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam, he demonstrated the presence of introns in mammalian genes His research uses mouse genetics to study innate and adaptive immunity, T cell tolerance, apoptosis and autoimmunity, and the regulation of T cell differentiation. Among his recent discoveries is the finding that genes interact across chromosomes in T cells, where a master control gene on chromosome 11 may physically touch a gene on chromosome 10, inducing it to produce a protein that primes the cell to fight infection in a specific way. This finding has wide-ranging implications for diseases including autoimmune disorders and cancer. Most recently, he has established the connection between inflammasomes, microbial homeostasis and chronic diseases.
In addition to our speakers, there will be an oral presentation of two abstracts. We invite all attendees to submit an abstract for a poster or oral presentation. Abstracts should be limited to 300 words and emailed to Nicholas.Licht@yale.edu by the close of business on February 28th. All those that submit abstracts will be notified by March 14th if their abstracts have been selected for a poster or oral presentation. Please be sure to include the person submitting the abstract, the authors, and the abstract title in your submission.