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Seminar recording
Professor of Pediatrics
Harvard Medical School
Attending Physician and Principal Investigator
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
“Dissecting and Targeting the Activation Mechanism of Pro-Apoptotic BAX”
Loren D. Walensky, MD, PhD is a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Principal Investigator and Attending Physician in the Department of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Children’s Hospital Boston, and Director of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Princeton University, MD and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and trained in pediatrics and pediatric hematology/oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Walensky’s research focuses on the chemical biology of deregulated apoptotic, transcriptional, and metabolic pathways in cancer, with a special emphasis on pediatric leukemias. The group develops and applies “stapled peptides†that preserve the primary and secondary structure of biologically-active motifs as new chemical probes and prototype therapeutics to respectively dissect and target pathologic signaling pathways in cancer and other diseases. Dr. Walensky is a current recipient of an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute and was named to Nature Biotechnology’s roster of Top 20 Translational Researchers of 2019.
Associate Professor
Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Department of Anesthesia
UC San Francisco
“Molecular puzzles in G protein-coupled receptor signaling”
Aashish Manglik, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Anesthesia at UCSF. Aashish received his B.A. in Biology and Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and his MD/PhD from Stanford University. His graduate work with Brian Kobilka focused on understanding the atomic basis of action of G protein-coupled receptors, notably the adrenergic, muscarinic, and opioid receptors important in various aspects of human physiology. He initially started his lab as the first Stanford Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University in 2016, with a focus on understanding transmembrane signal transduction. He subsequently started as an Assistant Professor at UCSF in 2017. Aashish has been named a Pew, Searle, Klingenstein, Vallee, and Mallinckrodt Scholar and is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award.