Molecular Biology and Genetics Seminars: Prof. Daniela Drummond-Barbosa
Prof. Daniela Drummond-Barbosa, from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will be the next guest of the seminar series organized by KHAS Molecular Biology and Genetics Department with her speech “Control of the Drosophila germline stem cell lineage by diet, temperature, and whole-body physiology” on Monday, April 4 at 3:00 pm Istanbul Time; 8:00 am US Time (Maryland).
The event will take place on Zoom and is open to anyone interested.
Abstract: Tissue stem cell lineages maintain organ function and respond to the external and systemic environments, but the underlying physiological, cellular and molecular in vivo mechanisms had remained largely unknown. Dr. Daniela Drummond-Barbosa’s research focuses on identifying the metabolic and physiological mechanisms that link the behavior of stem cell lineages to diet, stress, and other systemic inputs using the germline stem cell lineage of Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Over the past ~20 years, the Drummond-Barbosa lab identified specific roles for insulin and other known diet-dependent pathways, nuclear receptors, and adipocyte factors in linking diet to germline behavior, highlighting the complexity of the physiological network that modulates the germline stem cell lineage. More recently, they found that chronic exposure of adult Drosophila females to warm or cold temperatures leads to significant reduction in rates of egg production through distinct cellular mechanisms, providing a conceptual framework for investigating the effects of temperature and climate change on insect reproduction.
About the Speaker: Daniela Drummond-Barbosa was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Immunology from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. She next moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to join the Genetics graduate program at Yale University. She did her Ph.D. research with Daniel DiMaio on the interaction between the bovine papillomavirus E5 protein and the platelet-derived growth factor receptor in mammalian cells. Daniela did her postdoctoral training with Allan Spradling at the Carnegie Institution, studying adult tissue stem cell regulation by diet in the Drosophila model. In 2002, Daniela joined the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center as an Assistant Professor. In 2009, she relocated her lab to the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she is now a tenured Professor. In 2022, Daniela accepted a new joint faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research, where she will be moving her lab this summer. The Drummond-Barbosa lab investigates how stem cell lineages respond to external factors/physiology using the Drosophila oogenesis model. Daniela’s research has been externally funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society. She received the Chancellor’s Award for Research from Vanderbilt University in 2006, and the Shikani/El Hibri Prize for Discovery & Innovation in 2017 for her work. In 2014, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has served as a regular member of the National Institutes of Health Cellular Mechanisms in Aging and Development Study Section (2016-2020) and of the Development and Differentiation in Cancer Peer Review Committee of the American Cancer Society from 2012-2017 (Vice-Chair in 2015; Chair in 2016-2017), as Genetics Society of America Larry Sandler Award selection committee member (2015) and Chair (2016), and as Co-Organizer of the Genetics Society of America 55th Annual Drosophila Research Conference (2014).