Blanche Capel, PhD FASEB Board of Directors

Blanche Capel, PhD, is a James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology at Duke University Medical Center, where she began her research laboratory in 1993. Her graduate training was in mouse genetics and stem cell biology with Beatrice Mintz at and the University of Pennsylvania, followed by postdoctoral research in the Lovell-Badge laboratory at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, leading to the discovery of Sry, the male sex determining gene in mammals.

Work from the Capel laboratory is prominent in the field of primary sex determination and the cell fate and patterning decisions that underlie the development of the early bipotential mammalian gonad into either testis or ovary. Dr. Capel’s work on signaling pathways in the gonad led to the widely accepted current model that sex determination results from antagonism between the male and female transcriptional and cell signaling networks. She pioneered organ culture techniques for studying the organogenesis of the testis and ovary, and was among the first to develop live imaging to explore the critical role of the vasculature in the morphogenesis of the gonad. Recently, she has used systems-biology and mouse genetics approaches to characterize the global transcriptional network underlying gonad fate, and has investigated the conservation of these mechanisms in the red-eared slider turtle, in which sex determination is thermally regulated. Other work in her laboratory aims to understand how the intracellular program in germ cells, in combination with regulation from their niche, leads to the transition of germ cells from a pluripotent state into pro-spermatogonia. This work involves Dnd1Ter, a mouse mutant in which germ cells do not successfully navigate this transition, but instead are transformed to germ cell tumors.

Capel is an editor of , and serves on the editorial boards of Developmental Dynamics and Sexual Development. She was a founding member of the DEV1 study section at NIH, and has served on numerous other NIH and NSF panels as well. She has also served on the boards of the Society for Developmental Biology, the Society for the Study of Reproduction

and on the Board of Scientific Advisors at the Jackson Laboratory. She has organized the International Symposium on Vertebrate Sex Determination since 2006, and has been an organizer of the Cold Spring Harbor, Molecular of the Mouse course, as well as the biannual Cold Spring Harbor Germ Cell Meeting. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She serves as the representative to FASEB from the Society for Developmental Biology.

July 2013