LECTURES

Dr Minoda specializes in the relatively recent field of single cell transcriptomics (study of gene expression at the single cell resolution) and single cell epigenomics (study of chromatin landscape, which affects the functioning of a cell without changing its genetic code). Her work focuses specifically on the mechanisms behind aging, and she is one of the leading scientists behind the technologies that allow the study of gene expression at the level of a single cell.

Dr Taylor earned his Ph.D. in genetics from OHSU in Portland, Oregon. In 1998, he became part of the groundbreaking research team at RIKEN Genomic Science Center in Yokohama, that worked on the Human Genome Project. A few years later he became a team leader in bioinformatics, where he continued to work on the human genome, the chimpanzee genome, and more recently on metagenomics as related to human health and the environment. He is now a Senior Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Microbiome Sciences and a Coordinator at RIKEN's Center for Integrative Medical Sciences.

After graduating from Saint Maur, Dr Sancho-Shimizu attended McGill University in Montreal, where she obtained her BSc degree. She then moved to Paris to undertake her PhD at the Necker Children Hospital, and upon completion, she relocated to the United Kindgom in 2012 and started her own lab at the prestigious Imperial College in 2014. She and her team are currently working on understanding the Mendelian predispositions to rare childhood infections, specifically: identifying genes underlying childhood herpes simplex encephalitis, severe viral infections, and invasive meningococcal disease.

Lewis and Gilman are investigating the evolution of birdsong in captivity, with a particular focus on the Java sparrow. The Java sparrow was domesticated in Japan and is kept by hobbyists around the world, but it is now rare in the wild. Working with colleagues Masayo Soma at the University of Hokkaido and Leah Williams at Chester Zoo in the UK, they have discovered that Java sparrow songs are diverging in captivity and birds raised in Belgium sing different songs from those raised in Japan. The team is now trying to understand how extreme this divergence is. Are these just different accents, or are the birds speaking completely different languages? The answer is important for conservation. People hope someday to release captive birds to supplement the wild population, but if captive birds can no longer communicate with wild birds, such releases may not work.

Dr Tamura has experience in clinical dietetics, food science in schools and hospitals, public heath nutrition for the city of San Francisco and Oakland, CA, nutrition-epidemiology research on longitudinal cohort studies, research with CDC and Prevention designing BRFSS survey for Vietnamese population in USA, health promotion campaign for chronic disease risk reduction, nutrition education from preschool, kindergarten, grades 1-12, collegiate undergraduate nutrition, and graduate nutrition-epi research. Her areas of interest are mostly in chronic disease risk reduction and prevention of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, and diet-related cancers, which she believes is a misnomer because aerobic exercise, rather the lack of it, is a stronger risk factor of cancer incidence than diet by 3-fold.

Dr Tamura has experience in clinical dietetics, food science in schools and hospitals, public heath nutrition for the city of San Francisco and Oakland, CA, nutrition-epidemiology research on longitudinal cohort studies, research with CDC and Prevention designing BRFSS survey for Vietnamese population in USA, health promotion campaign for chronic disease risk reduction, nutrition education from preschool, kindergarten, grades 1-12, collegiate undergraduate nutrition, and graduate nutrition-epi research. Her areas of interest are mostly in chronic disease risk reduction and prevention of cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, and diet-related cancers, which she believes is a misnomer because aerobic exercise, rather the lack of it, is a stronger risk factor of cancer incidence than diet by 3-fold.