2022-23 Rising Star speaker
POSTPONED, NEW DATE TBA
Polly Fordyce
Associate Professor of Bioengineering and of Genetics, Fellow of the ChEM-H Institute, Stanford University
12:00 – 1:00 PM
290 Hearst Mining Building
or Register for Zoom link here: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0oDc_5O4Q8G8_jrJlfWcnw
Microfluidics for High-Throughput and Quantitative Biophysics, Biochemistry, and Single-Cell Biology
Abstract:
Recent technological advances in genomics and proteomics have driven an explosion in our knowledge of the molecular parts within cells. Interactions between these parts drive all biological processes: proteins bind DNA and RNA to regulate transcription and translation, dense networks of protein-protein interactions convey cellular signals, and enzyme-substrate interactions allow all of the chemical transformations essential for metabolism and signaling. The strength of these interactions predicts the timing and identity of downstream responses; therefore, quantitative biophysical and biochemical measurements are critical to decipher these networks, predict how they are disrupted in disease, and manipulate them for therapeutic purposes. In this seminar, I’ll present the development of and results from several new microfluidic platforms that make it possible to acquire quantitative biochemical and biophysical data in vitro for thousands to millions of sequence variants in parallel.
Bio:
Polly Fordyce is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Genetics and Institute Scholar of ChEM-H at Stanford, where her lab develops and applies new microfluidic platforms for quantitative and high-throughput biophysics, biochemistry, and single-cell biology. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with undergraduate degrees in physics and biology before moving to Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics for work with Professor Steve Block developing instrumentation and assays for single-molecule studies of kinesin motor proteins. For her postdoctoral research, she worked with Professor Joe DeRisi to develop a new microfluidic platform for understanding how transcription factors recognize and bind their DNA targets as well as a new technology for bead-based multiplexing. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an NIH New Innovator Award, and the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, and she is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
Past Rising Stars
2022-23
Fei Chen
Core Member, Broad Institute, MIT
Assistant Professor, Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University
“Tissue genomics: genomic measurements in context”
View the recorded lecture
2020-21
Tim Downing
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine
PhD Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, 2013
“Synthetic Genome Regulation for Cell and Tissue Engineering”
2019-20
Professor Krishanu Saha
Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
“Towards nonviral, in vivo genome editing therapies: new tools and models to facilitate translation”
2017-18
Professor Stanley Qi of Stanford University
2016-17
Professor Kim Woodrow of the University of Washington
“Engineering the mucosal microenvironment promotes targeting of particulate and cellular immunotherapies to lymphoid organs”