Department of Pediatric Surgery at (CU).
Dr. Manu Platt is the inaugural director of the NIH-wide Center for Biomedical Engineering Technology Acceleration (BETA Center), housed within the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) Intramural Research Program. In addition, Dr. Platt is NIBIB associate director for Scientific Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Previously, Dr. Platt was professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies in the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. He also was Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scientist and Deputy Director, Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program at Georgia Tech Walter H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow.
Dr. Platt’s science interest was cultivated as a middle and high school student during his participation in FAME (Forum to Advance Minorities in Engineering), a science and engineering enrichment program at Delaware State University in Dover, DE. Dr. Platt earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology from Morehouse College and was distinguished as an ARCS Foundation Scholar and a NASA Scholar. During his senior year at Morehouse, he began tissue engineering research with Dr. Robert M. Nerem in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he would ultimately join for his graduate studies where he earned his PhD under the direction of Dr. Hanjoong Jo studying mechanosensitive regulation of endothelial cell biology and its role in cardiovascular disease. Dr. Platt was in the second class of the newly established joint Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. Program between Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine which has now been the #2 program in the country for more than a decade and has an excellent MD/PhD program.
After postdoctoral research at MIT with Drs. Linda Griffith and Douglas Lauffenburger, in 2009, Dr. Platt began a tenure track faculty position in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. He has developed a diverse, robust research program with focuses on proteolytic mechanisms of disease, translational approaches to reduce strokes in people affected by sickle cell disease and harnessing proteolytic networks and systems biology tools to predict disease progression in patients with breast cancer which has led to work investigating mechanisms underlying aggressive breast cancers in young women in Ethiopia.
Dr. Platt is an outspoken leader for his community and an avid supporter of his undergraduate and graduate students from a number of diverse backgrounds and experiences. He has participated in conversations with the Gladstone Institute on issues surrounding Diversity and Inclusion, and Anti-Racism. He participated in Discussions on Science and Diversity through Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Platt has graduated ten Ph.D. students under his advisement with four of whom have gone on to begin tenure track professors at top universities, three of them being Black women, and another to a tenure track teaching position. Other graduates have entered industry positions, medical writing, public-partner biotech relationships, and more. He is proud of all of them! We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Manu Platt to the 38th Annual National MD-PhD Student Conference.
Kerry J. Ressler, MD, PhD, is chief scientific officer and James and Patricia Poitras Chair in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is current president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and a past president of the Society for Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Ressler is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Ressler’s lab focuses on translational research bridging molecular neurobiology in animal models with human genetic research on emotion, particularly fear and anxiety disorders. He has published over 500 manuscripts ranging from basic molecular mechanisms of fear processing to understanding how emotion is encoded in a region of the brain called the amygdala, in both animal models and human patients.
The Ressler lab uses well-established mouse models to examine different aspects of fear learning (e.g., acquisition, consolidation and extinction). To do this, they utilize a variety of molecular-genetic neurocircuitry tools such as optogenetics, DREADDs, cell-type specific calcium imaging and transcriptional profiling and DNA methylation analyses combined with viral-vector and transgenic manipulations. These models allow the lab to investigate the role of different brain regions, in particular the amygdala, as well as neural cell populations, and the underlying gene regulation in these cells in fear processing. Furthermore, his work examines how these mechanisms may be involved in the development of fear-based disorders in humans, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression and other stress-related syndromes. Additionally, Dr. Ressler’s lab utilizes data collected from human clinical populations to identify genetic traits and neural processes that may contribute to the development of these illnesses and provide novel targets for research using animal models. By gaining a more mechanistic understanding of how fear works in the mammalian brain, Dr. Ressler’s discoveries contribute to the development of novel treatments, and possibly even the prevention, of fear based psychiatric illnesses.
Dr. Vera Gorbunova is the Endowed Doris Johns Cherry Professor at the University of Rochester and serves as co-Director for the Rochester Aging Research Center. Dr. Gorbunova has made important contributions to our understanding of the biology of Aging, DNA Repair, and Cancer. Aging is one of the biggest mysteries of biology. “Why do we age?” is a basic biological question as aging involves accumulation of DNA mutations and double-strand breaks. Dr. Gorbunova and her lab have performed intriguing studies comparing aging characteristics in short- and long-lived animal species including mice, porcupines, naked mole rats, and even whales. Dr. Gorbunova earned her B.S. degrees at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, and her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. More recently the focus of her research has been on the longest-lived rodent species the naked mole rats and the blind mole rat. Dr. Gorbunova identified high molecular weight hyaluronan as the key mediator of cancer-resistance in the naked mole rat. Her work received awards from the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Glenn Foundation, American Federation for Aging Research, and from the National Institutes of Health. Her work was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize from PNAS, the prize for research on aging from ADPS/Alianz, France, Prince Hitachi Prize in Comparative Oncology, Japan, and Davey prize from Wilmot Cancer Center.
Dr. Gorbunova is committed to the success of her trainees and has mentored many graduate and undergraduate students who have gone on to secure successful academic positions. We are very excited to welcome Dr. Vera Gorbunova to the 38th Annual National MD-PhD Student Conference.
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