Posts classified under: Faculty

Biography

Leonid Kruglyak, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Diller-von Furstenberg Endowed Chair in Human Genetics. Dr. Kruglyak received his A.B. degree in physics from Princeton University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, from the University of California at Berkeley. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Oxford University, he joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research as a research scientist. Subsequently, he held a faculty position in the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he was also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. In 2005, Dr. Kruglyak returned to Princeton University as a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. In 2010, he was named the inaugural William R. Harman ’63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics. He also founded and chaired the Graduate Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology at Princeton. In 2013, Dr. Kruglyak moved to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he holds appointments in the Departments of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry and continues to serve as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Kruglyak serves on the the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science Magazine, the editorial board of PLoS Genetics, the advisory board of bioRxiv, and the scientific advisory council for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.

Dr. Kruglyak is a recipient of many awards, including a James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics, and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for distinguished contributions to the study of variation in the human genome and for pioneering genetic studies of gene expression variation.” His research interests focus on understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes.

Research Description

Why do individuals differ from each other?

My lab is interested in the genetic basis of heritable traits. The genetic basis of most traits is complex, involving many genes that interact with each other and the environment. My lab conducts experiments in model organisms (currently, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans), as well as computational analyses, aimed at understanding how changes at the level of DNA are shaped by molecular and evolutionary forces, and how these changes lead to all the observable differences among individuals within a species.

Awards & Honors

2010 – 2013                     William R. Harman ’63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics
1999 – 2014                     James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellow in Human Genetics
1994 – 1999                     Special Emphasis Research Career Award, NHGRI
1992 – 1993                     NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow
1987 – 1990                     Fannie and John Hertz Graduate Fellow
2010                                 Appointed to the Board of Reviewing Editors, Science Magazine
2010                                 Agilent Thought Leader Award
2007                                 ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Molecular Biology and Genetics
2007                                 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
2002                                 The MERIT Award, National Institute of Mental Health
2000                                 Science in Medicine Lecturer, University of Washington School of Medicine
2000                                 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics
1987                                 Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Highest Honors in Physics, Princeton University
1987                                 Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics, Princeton University

Biography:

Dr. Scott Kitchen’s research interests are focused on investigating the effects of viral infection, as well as other cellular abnormalities, on human hematopoiesis and on exploring ways to correct defects that exist in immunity to viral and cellular antigens. Kitchen’s laboratory is focused in understanding the mechanisms that limit the immune systems’ ability to clear infection or cancer and in developing ways that augment these responses. They are interested in developing gene therapy-based approaches to engineer human hematopoietic stem cells to reconstitute and/or enhance immune responses following their development into mature cells that specifically target HIV infection as well as other viral and cellular antigens. He has a long standing interest in the development of humanized mouse models that allow the characterization of human hematopoiesis and engineered immunity in a surrogate in vivo host.

Research Interests

Alex’s interests began to focus on biology when undergraduate research on topoisomerases provided the thrill of discovery while studying for a Physics BA at Cambridge. During his graduate research with Dr. Bob Roeder at Rockefeller University, he cloned genes for TBP and some components of the TFIID complex, and developed the now popular His-tag to purify and characterize recombinant proteins. During his postdoctoral training with Dr. David Baltimore at MIT and Caltech, he first focused on HIV and then aimed to understand the dynamic control of the NFκB signaling network and its ability to produce distinct gene expression programs. Reactivating undergraduate math and physics skills, and with the help of really smart students and postdocs, Alex has pursued a Systems Biology approach (iterating between quantitative experimentation and computational modeling) in order to understand how molecular networks generate precise immune responses to pathogens and control development of the immune system.  A recurring theme of our research is that it is the kinetic properties of these regulatory networks that provide the explanations for understanding specificity, robustness, diversification, fine-tuning, and other characteristics of biological processes.

Alex is PI of the Signaling Systems Laboratory, first at UCSD (2003-2013) and then at UCLA (since 2014).  At UCSD he was Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Director of the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, was PI of the P50 Center of Excellence for Systems Biology (SDCSB) and co-founded the BioCircuits Institute (BCI).  At UCLA he is the Asher Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics (MIMG), and the director of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCBio).

Andrew Goldstein, Ph.D., investigates the interplay between inflammation, epithelial progenitor cells and the formation of tumors. Epithelial progenitor cells give rise to the cells that make up epithelial tissues, which line all of the organs and cavities inside the body. Previous research has established that normal prostate epithelial progenitor cells and aggressive prostate cancer cells possess similar characteristics. Goldstein studies epithelial progenitor cells in order to uncover the cellular and molecular changes that initiate prostate cancer and cause cancer progression and resistance to treatment. His research goals are to inform the development of new drugs that inhibit these changes and stop progression of the disease, as well as increase early detection of prostate cancer through improved screening methods.

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men, behind only lung cancer. About one man in 39 will die of prostate cancer each year, and an estimated 180,000 new cases of the disease are reported annually in the United States. Goldstein’s research has always focused on prostate cancer; he completed his graduate work in the lab of Dr. Owen Witte, studying epithelial progenitor cells that can increase cancer risk. Goldstein and Witte’s work included the first demonstration of a cell-of-origin for human prostate cancer, a discovery that could lead to the development of better tools for prediction, diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Goldstein is expanding the research to address the effects of chronic prostate inflammation on epithelial progenitor cells that can initiate cancer.

Goldstein also seeks to define metabolic regulators of progenitor cells and prostate cancer. In particular, the lab is studying the role of a molecule called CD38, which may help to prevent aggressive prostate cancers. He is taking a number of approaches to understand why CD38 is present in non-aggressive prostate cancers and absent in most aggressive prostate cancers. Understanding how low CD38 levels affect the growth of prostate cancer tumors could lead to the development of improved screening methods. Goldstein believes that the CD38 molecule could be used as a biomarker to help clinicians predict which patients will have aggressive metastatic disease. Such early detection can reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries and inform specific treatment options.

Goldstein earned his doctorate degree in molecular biology at UCLA.