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U-M names director and faculty for Life Sciences InstitutePresident Mary Sue Coleman has named cell biologist Alan R. Saltiel to be the director of the Life Sciences Institute. She also has announced that six prominent U-M scientists have agreed to join the institute as its “charter faculty."
“Dr. Saltiel is an internationally recognized authority on diabetes, obesity and cellular signaling, and he has experience leading multidisciplinary research teams in the private sector,” Coleman says. “With Alan, we’ve assembled a charter faculty of six creative, thoughtful scientists who are among the very best.”
The charter faculty members will be: “By seeding the institute with these talented faculty from departments across the University, the institute will build upon our strength and ensure that the institute and the rest of the campus benefit in the strongest possible way from each other,” Interim Provost Paul Courant says. The $100 million, 240,000-square-foot Life Sciences Institute, set to open in fall 2003, is built around a “lab without walls” concept in which researchers from a variety of disciplines will interact and collaborate in shared spaces. It is considered a new way of doing science at Michigan--one that is needed to explore the difficult and interrelated scientific questions of understanding life at the level of cells and individual molecules. It will house 20 to 30 faculty and their research teams, totaling about 350 people. The charter faculty will move their labs to the institute, but will retain tenured appointments in their respective academic departments. Saltiel replaces Jack E. Dixon, a biochemist who announced in July that he will be leaving U-M to become dean of scientific affairs at the University of California, San Diego. Saltiel served as associate director of the institute before being named to replace Dixon. The creation of a high-powered core of
charter faculty will accelerate LSI’s
recruitment efforts. The charter group
will apply their experience and vision
“to make this a place people want
to work,” biochemist Rowena Matthews
says. Genetics, genomics and proteomics: Examining the functions and expression patterns of genes and developing nanoscale tools to study gene and protein properties; understanding the molecular basis of disease susceptibility.
Structural, chemical and computational biology: Exploring and modeling the three-dimensional shapes of genes and proteins with novel physical and computational methods; designing chemicals that change protein properties. By following the science where it leads, rather than being circumscribed by the definition of a particular discipline, institute scientists are going to find some unexpected discoveries where their work intersects. For example, geneticist David Ginsburg’s work on the specifics of the blood-clotting mechanism in a particular kind of hemophilia has led to some general understanding of how the cell moves proteins around within its machinery. “Studying this obscure human disease, we got a very fundamental insight into how the cell works,” Ginsburg says. “Studying human disease can lead to some basic biological insights.” Conversely, studying a biologically basic
model organism like yeast can lead to
some insights into human health, cell
biologist Daniel Klionsky says. The mechanism
used by yeast to recycle its own contents
during a period of starvation happens
to be a good model for understanding the
molecular defects that may cause human
cells to become cancerous, or undergo
processes that lead to neurodegenerative
disease and some kinds of heart disease,
Klionsky says. “We’d like
to have a simple living system to look
at this in detail.”
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