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Faculty and Staff
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LEONARD I. ZON, MD
Director, Children's Hospital Boston Stem Cell Program
Grousbeck Professor of Pediatrics
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Dr. Leonard Zon is the founder and director of the Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston and the first incumbent of the newly established Grousbeck Professor of Pediatrics Chair at Children's. An internationally renowned pediatrician and researcher specializing in blood diseases, Dr. Zon is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, founder and immediate past President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), and Chair of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute's Executive Committee. In October, 2005, Dr. Zon was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of medicine and health.
As a practicing pediatrician, Dr. Zon has been involved in many battles fought by physicians, researchers, parents and small children against an enemy disease; he has experienced the pain and deep frustration of losing some of these young patients because science had not yet found a way to deliver the help they needed. When human ES cells were first isolated and grown in a laboratory in 1998, Dr. Zon recognized their potential as a source of hope for his own and so many other young patients. He has since gained international recognition for his pioneering research in the fields of stem cell biology and cancer genetics.
Dr. Zon's current research focuses on two avenues of investigation: the identification of the specific genes that direct stem cells to become cancers or to develop into specialilzed blood or organ cells, and the development of genetic or chemical suppressors to cure cancers and many other diseases attacking children.
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GEORGE Q. DALEY, MD, PhD
Associate Director, Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Children's Hospital Boston
Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School
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George Daley is internationally recognized as an expert in stem cell research and for his work in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), a cancer of the blood caused by genetically defective stem cells. His current research is aimed at translating insights in stem cell biology into cellular therapies for degenerative, malignant and genetic diseases. Dr. Daley's laboratory reported the first successful application of somatic cell nuclear transfer of embryonic stem cells to treat genetic disease in a mouse model of immune difficiency (together with Rudolf Jaenisch) and the first creation of functional sperm cells from embryonic stem cells, work that was cited by Science Magazine as a "Top Ten" breakthrough for 2003.
Dr. Daley received a Ph.D. in Biology from MIT, working with Nobelist Dr. David Baltimore. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, where he was only the twelfth individual in the school's history to be awarded the degree summa cum laude. He has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and holds awards from the Harvard Medical School, The National Institutes of Health, the New England Cancer Society, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America recognizing his contributions to medical research. Dr. Daley was recently named an inaugural winner of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, which provides a five year unrestricted grant to pursue highly innovative research. In October, 2007, Dr. Daley was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investogator.
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Richard Gregory established his laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston in 2006. Dr. Gregory received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, UK in 2001, studying genomic imprinting at the Babraham Institute. Dr. Gregory performed his postdoctoral work at the Fox Chase Cancer Center and the Wistar
Institute, Philadelphia. His postdoctoral research focused on mechanisms of miRNA biogenesis and function, and was supported by a Jane Coffin Childs Research Fellowship. In addition to his appointments at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School, he is a Principal Member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.His laboratory's research focus is on understanding the pathways of how small regulatory RNAs are generated, how they exert their gene regulatory function, their role in the self-renewal and pluripotency of embryonic stem (ES) cells, and their relevance to human disease. RNA interference (RNAi) describes the recently identified phenomenon whereby small non-coding RNAs can silence gene expression. It is emerging that cells possess a wide repertoire of tiny regulatory RNAs that are critical for a variety of biological pathways and can repress genes via numerous mechanisms. For posttranscriptional gene silencing, microRNAs (miRNAs), and small inhibitory RNAs (siRNAs), function as guide molecules inducing mRNA degradation or translational repression. In mammals, hundreds of miRNAs have been identified, and have been implicated in controlling diverse developmental pathways. Indeed, recent predictions indicate that over one third of all human genes are targeted by miRNAs.
For more information on the work taking place in Dr. Gregory's lab, please see the Gregory Lab section of this website.
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Carla Kim established her laboratory at Children's Hospital Boston in 2006. Dr. Kim received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 2002, studying the functions of the double-strand break repair protein Rad50 in vivo. Carla was a post-doctoral fellow in Tyler Jacks' laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her studies, she was interested in whether there was a self-renewing population of stem cells or progenitors in the adult lung and if these cells play a role in lung cancer. She identified a lung stem cell population called bronchioalveolar stem cells (BASCs); these cells had the ability to exhibit stem cell characteristics in culture and are likely to be the cells from which some forms of lung cancer arise.
Carla Kim's pioneering work to isolate a population of lung stem cells that can be cultured opens up ways to address significant biological questions. The ability to examine the normal lung and lung cancer progenitors has transformed lung biology. It is now possible through cell biology and genomic approaches to examine the mechanism of lung epithelial stem cell development, how these cells are maintained, their use in repair, and their role in cancer. Carla's laboratory at Children's Hospital has begun investigating the role of BASCs during conditions that require differentiation to repair lung tissue, during early stages of tumorigenesis, and during lung cancer progression. This includes creating new animal models to study lung stem cells and microarray studies. In addition, she is planning to do a screen to identify the genes that are critically required for the self-renewal and differentiation of BASCs. The work projected in the Kim Laboratory will have an impact on many diseases including cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and lung cancer. For more information on the work taking place in Dr. Kim's lab, please see the Kim Lab section of this website.
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THORSTEN M. SCHLAEGER, PhD
Head, Human Embryonic Stem Cell Core Facility
Instructor, HMS
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Dr. Schlaeger is a renowned expert in mouse genetics, endothelial and hematopoetic developmental biology, and embryonic stem cells. He holds a PhD in Human Biology from Phipps University in Marburg, Germany. He received the prestigious Otto Hahn medal for his work on endothelial specific gene regulation, which was performed in the laboratories of Drs. Werner Risau (Max Planck Institute) and Tom N. Sato (Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, Boston).
In 1998, Dr. Werner Risau, his PhD supervisor, mentor and friend, succumbed to leukemia at age 44, following an unsuccessful bone marrow transplantation. Motivated by this to study the mechanisms of blood cell development, Dr. Schlaeger joined Dr. Stuart Orkin's laboratory at Children's Hospital, where he worked for four years on the role of the stem cell leukemia gene in endothelial and hematopoetic stem cell formation. After a year working as a Senior Scientist in the mouse genetics group of Cell and Molecular Technologies, Dr. Schlaeger returned to Children's in 2005 to serve as the Head of the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Core Facility within the newly established Stem Cell Program.For information on Dr. Schlaeger's current research, go to the the hESC Core Facility section of this website.
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YI ZHOU, PhD
Director, Children's Hospital Boston Zebrafish Genome Project
Instructor in Pediatrics
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Dr. Yi Zhou has expertise in Molecular Biology, Moelcular Genetics, Genomics and Development Biology of Vertebrates. He holds a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Miami School of Medicine and an MS in Biochemistry from the Graduate School of the Chinese University of Sciences and Technology. After completing transient training on DNA replication studies as a Research Associate in Dr. Marietta Lee's lab at University of Miami School of medicine, he joined Dr. Leonard Zon's lab at HHMI and Children's Hospital Boston and worked on projects to isolate new factors that control blood formation in vertebrates by expression cloning.
At the beginning of the Trans-NIH Zebrafish Genome Project Initiatives, Dr. Zhou was called to direct the Zebrafish Genome Project Initiative at Children's Hospital. He has directed this group for the past seven years. His group has placed over 7,000 markers on a zebrafish genome map, the T51 RH panel map. This map has played a very critical role in zebrafish genetic and genomic research, as well as in establishing zebrafish models for human diseases. His team is now shifting the research focus to help complete the zebrafish genome sequence assembly, annotate the zebrafish genome and apply genomic research tools and resources to study complex biological processes such as blood formation and tumorgenesis. For more information on the work currently underway, see the Zebrafish Genome Project page of this website.
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