SEB Glasgow 2009 - Plenary Lecturers
Bidder and Woolhouse Lectures
In honour of the Harold Woolhouse and George Parker Bidder the Bidder and Woolhouse Lectures are the major plenary lectures of the Society for Experimental Biology.
For a list of previous Bidder and Woolhouse Lecturers please click here.
Bidder Lecture - 28th June 2009 17:30 - 18:30
The Bidder Lecturer for 2009 is Kim Nasmyth from the University of Oxford.
Kim's lecture is entitled "How does cohesin hold sister DNAs together?"
Kim Nasmyth joined the Department of Biochemistry in January 2006 holding the position of the Whitley Chair and on 1st October 2006 took over the position of Head of the Department. He was a PhD student in Mitchison’s lab in Edinburgh (1974-77), a post doc in Seattle Washington (1978-1980), a Robertson research fellow at Cold Spring for molecular biology in Cambridge (1982-87) before moving to the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P.), where he was a senior scientist from 1988-1997 and Director from 1997-2006. He is on the scientific advisory boards of numerous research institutes and companies and has been heavily involved in establishing a new exhibition about Mendel’s life and work at St Thomas’s monastery in Brno. He has recently had an important role in establishing the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) next to the IMP. His scientific work has addressed the mechanisms by which genes are turned on and off during development, how DNA replication is controlled, and how chromosomes ensure their segregation during mitosis and meiosis. It has been recognized by several awards most recently the Gairdner International Award (2007) for a series of discoveries pinpointing the novel mechanisms in cell division that are essential to life. Also, the Boveri award for Molecular Cancer Genetics (2003), the Croonian lecture/Medal of the Royal Society (2002), the Austrian Wittgenstein prize (1999), the Louis Jeantet prize for Medicine (1997), the Unilever Science prize (1996), and the FEBS Silver Medal (1995). He is a fellow of the Royal Society (1989), a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1999), and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999).
Woolhouse Lecture - 29th June 2009 09:00 - 10:00
The Woolhouse Lecturer for 2009 is Hugh Dickinson from the University of Oxford.
Hugh's lecture is entitled “What goes around, comes around; alternation of generation revisited”
Hugh Dickinson is Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford University. He was an undergraduate at Birmingham, and split his PhD (on RNA changes during plant meiocyte development) between Birmingham and Wisconsin, supervised by Jack Heslop-Harrison. Following this theme into his postdoc work with Peter Bell and Dan Lewis at UC London, he worked on nuclear/cytoplasmic interactions following meiosis and in the early gametophyte, and developed an interest in the genetics of pollen wall and pollen coating development. Moving to Reading in the mid 70’s his group moved this work forward to include molecular aspects of pollen/stigma interactions, and the following 10+ years were spent in unravelling the complex ‘dry’ pollen stigma interaction in Brassica, and identifying the family of molecules containing the male incompatibility determinant. As Head of the School of Plant Sciences at Reading, he built up the School - originally founded in the late 60’s by Vernon Heywood - to include most plant-based activities on the Reading Campus. In the early 90’s he moved to Oxford, and recognising that the large number of unexplained results he had obtained in his early work on meiosis and gametogenesis were the result of epigenetic effects, he refocused his group’s activities on the ‘reprogramming’ of epigenetic marks that accompanies meiosis, gametogenesis and fertilisation. His lab currently works on the epigenetic control of early seed development in maize, particularly the imprinting of polycomb group protein genes active in the endosperm, and the role of small RNA pathways in regulating male gametophyte and germline development in Arabidopsis.
Hugh Dickinson has a long-time interest in Botanic Gardens and the important roles they play in education and conservation. He is currently Keeper of the Oxford Botanic Garden, and was a Trustee and then Chair of the Science Trustees of Kew Gardens from 1997-2002. He is also a Governing Council Member of the John Innes Centre, and Chairman of the Annals of Botany Company. His recreational interests include rebuilding (very slowly) Italian performance cars of the 1960s, and he has a weird and worrying taste (according to his family) in films and music.