Tomorrow, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Kathrin Plath who will present a seminar in the Stem Cell Seminar series entitled:
"Defining the Mechanism of Transcription Factor Induced Reprogramming"
Location: Natural Sciences I
Room: 1114
Time: 4:00 pm, Thursday May 7, 2009
Dr. Plath is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at UCLA and has been a member of the UCLA Stem Cell Institute since 2006. She completed her graduate work with Dr. Tom Rappaport at Harvard Medical School where she defined how the signal sequence of a secretory protein is recognized by translocation channels in the ER membrane. Dr. Plath was also a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Barbara Panning at UCSF where she began studying epigenetic gene regulation in female mammalian cells. Her interest in chromatin regulators continued when she joined Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch's lab at the Whitehead Institute at MIT studying embryonic stem cells. Dr. Plath currently works on the epigenetic regulation of stem cell self-renewal, differentiation and cancer. She uses human embryonic stem cells to understand how chromatin modifications during development can control gene expression, cell fate and cellular identity. Most recently, Dr. Plath's lab was one of the first labs to generate induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from human somatic cells. Her studies have shown that transcription factor-induced reprogramming can revert cells of the somatic epigenome to the ES-like state. Dr. Plath has received numerous awards for her work and recently received a Young Investigator Award from CIRM.
