speakers friday 14 february
Stephan Huveneers
Dr. Stephan Huveneers is Associate Professor at Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam. His group investigates the role of molecular events that take place at endothelial adhesions within the context of the blood vessel wall. He completed his doctoral studies at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in 2008 and then did his postdoc at the Hubrecht Institute. In 2012, he started his research group at Sanquin Research and was recruited to the Amsterdam UMC in 2016 to embed his research group in a cardiovascular biomedical research institute. Dr. Huveneers is board member of the Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences research institute, the Netherlands Vascular Biology Organization and the European Vascular Biology Organization.
The Huveneers lab studies the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for endothelial mechanotransduction through changes in cellular interactions. Their studies have resulted in the identification and unraveling of novel molecular systems that control endothelial barrier function, angiogenesis and are involved in cardiovascular disease. The use of live fluorescence microscopy approaches is a key signature of their studies.
X: @Huveneers_lab
Nathan Lawson
Dr. Lawson received his B.S. in Zoology from the University of Rhode Island in 1994 and his PhD in Biology from Yale in 1999. After a postdoc at National Institutes of Health, he joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2002. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Cancer Biology. Dr. Lawson has spent more than twenty years using the zebrafish as a model system to investigate the development of blood and lymphatic vessels in the embryo. His work has revealed novel insights into the cellular mechanisms of angiogenesis and the specification of endothelial identity. At the same time, the Lawson Lab has continued to expand the utility of the zebrafish model, including application of genome editing tools to generate the first knockout zebrafish. Current work continues to investigate vascular and lymphatic development, with an emphasis on understanding vascular anomalies. These efforts include generating zebrafish models for capillary and arteriovenous malformation and chemical genetics to identify therapeutic leads. An overview of ongoing work using these approaches to study Sturge-Weber and CM-AVM syndromes will be presented here.
He is also the Director of Research for the Lymphatic Malformation Institute, a non-profit organization that funds research on complex lymphatic anomalies (www.lmiresearch.org). He works closely with The Lymphangiomatosis & Gorham’s Disease Alliance (LGDA) and is the Research Leader for a Rare as One Project with the LGDA and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).