Gurdon Institute 20122011 PROSPECTUS / ANNUAL REPORT 20112010
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The Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute 20122011 PROSPECTUS / ANNUAL REPORT 20112010 Gurdon I N S T I T U T E PROSPECTUS 2012 ANNUAL REPORT 2011 http://www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk CONTENTS THE INSTITUTE IN 2011 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................3 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND..........................................................................................................4 CENTRAL SUPPORT SERVICES....................................................................................................5 FUNDING.........................................................................................................................................................5 RETREAT............................................................................................................................................................5 RESEARCH GROUPS.........................................................................................................6 MEMBERS OF THE INSTITUTE................................................................................44 CATEGORIES OF APPOINTMENT..............................................................................44 POSTGRADUATE OPPORTUNITIES..........................................................................44 SENIOR GROUP LEADERS.............................................................................................44 GROUP LEADERS.......................................................................................................................48 SUPPORT STAFF.....................................................................................................................50 INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS.......................................................................................51 TALKS BY INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS.............................................................54 OTHER INFORMATION STAFF AFFILIATIONS.............................................................................................................58 HONOURS AND AWARDS........................................................................................................58 EDITORIAL BOARDS OF JOURNALS.............................................................................58 INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD...........................................58 CHAIRMAN OF MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE................................................58 LEAVERS DURING 2011................................................................................................59 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..............................................................Inside back cover 2 THE GURDON INSTITUTE THE INSTITUTE IN 2011 INTRODUCTION As the reports from the individual research groups on the following pages demonstrate, 2011 has been another productive year for the Institute. The most notable changes have been the arrival of Dr Jenny Gallop as a new group leader, and the departure of Dr Masanori Mishima. Jenny joins us from Marc Kirschner’s group at Harvard Medical School, where she developed an in vitro model for the formation of cellular protrusions, such as filopodia. She has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship and a European Research Council starting grant to study how membranes and actin regulators interact to control the assembly of various actin structures. Masanori is leaving us after six years in the Institute to become a Professor at the Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology that has just opened at the University of Warwick. We shall all miss him and his group very much, and wish them every success in their exciting new venture. We also said farewell to the staff of Mission Therapeutics, OMX photomicrograph of A dividing Primordial Germ cell (100x). GOF reporter, who had been provided space in the Institute for a year, while they set green; DAPI, blue. (Roopsha Sengupta, Surani Group, 2011) up their own laboratories. Mission Therapeutics is a new biotechnology the Royal Society’s Buchanan Medal “ in recognition of his distinguished company founded by Professor Steve Jackson to develop new contribution to medical sciences”, as well as a European Research anticancer treatments based on the work on DNA damage pathways Council Advanced Investigator award to support his research into coming out of his lab. DNA damage responses. Tony Kouzarides has also been awarded a As usual, the outstanding research of my colleagues has been European Research Council Advanced Investigator grant to study the recognised by various prizes and awards. Steve Jackson was awarded role of non-coding RNAs in transcription, and Azim Surani has won a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award to study the principles and programming of the mammalian germline. Phil Zegerman was awarded the Cancer Research UK Hardiman Redon prize 2010. Many other groups in the Institute have also secured new research funding, bringing our annual income from grants to over £12 million this year. Advanced imaging has always been one of the strengths of the Institute and 2011 has seen several important developments that will significantly improve our facilities in this area. For many years, the resolution of light microscopy was limited by diffraction, making it impossible to distinguish structures that are less than 200nm apart. A number of recent advances have now made it possible to resolve much smaller structures and the Institute has been awarded funding to invest in several systems that break the diffraction limit in different ways. Firstly, we have been awarded a Wellcome Trust equipment grant with other groups in Cambridge to purchase an OMX microscope that uses structured illumination to give twice the resolution of a standard light microscope. Secondly, Jenny Gallop has secured funding for a dSTORM (direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy) system that can resolve structures as small as 20nm, although it cannot image quickly. Separation of DNA (stained red with propidium iodide) between mother and Finally, my group has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award daughter yeast cells. (Davide Mantiero & Vincent Gaggioli, Zegerman Group, 2011) to collaborate with groups at Yale and Oxford Universities and the THE GURDON INSTITUTE 3 THE INSTITUTE IN 2011 MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to develop the next generation of super-resolution microscopes that can image deep inside cells in real- time. Thus, the researchers in the Gurdon will be able to observe the behaviour of molecules in living tissues with unprecedented resolution, keeping us at the forefront of this rapidly moving field. Much of the success of the Institute depends on its friendly and cooperative atmosphere, and I would like to highlight the role played by Gurdon Institute Postdoc Association in enhancing the scientific and social life of the Institute. This year, the postdocs hosted research seminars from Titia de Lange (Rockefeller University), Marco Foiani (IFOM-IEO. Milan) and Anne Ridley (King’s College, London), as well as career talks by Jonathon Milner, a former Gurdon postdoc, now founder and CEO of Abcam, Pamela Feliciano, an associate editor of Nature Genetics, and Alison Schuldt who did her PhD in the Institute and is now chief editor of Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. They also held a one day postdoc retreat that included a collaboration networking event, a session on how to supervise students and a Total number of staff 1992 - 2011 barbecue. Most recently, the postdocs invited all of the core staff to a special beer and pizza ‘Happy Hour’ to thank them for all their work with how cells, including stem cells, acquire and maintain their normal ensuring the smooth running of the Institute. I am therefore delighted function, whereas cancer is a result of a cell breaking loose from its to announce that the President of the Postdoc Association, Benjamin correct controls and becoming abnormal. Both areas require a detailed Klapholz, has been awarded this year’s Martin Evans Memorial Cup, knowledge of intra- and intercellular processes, which need to be which is given annually to the person who has made the greatest analysed at the scientific and technical levels. To understand what goes contribution to the social life of the Institute. wrong when a cell becomes cancerous requires knowledge of the processes that ensure correct function in normal development. At the Next year marks the 21st anniversary of the founding of the Gurdon technical level, the analysis of cellular and molecular processes requires Institute (although we only adopted this name in 2004), and we are familiarity with techniques that no single person can master, including busy preparing for a special symposium and celebration to mark our coming of age. We have lined up a distinguished list of participants, including three Nobel laureates, and half of the speakers will be former students and postdocs in the Institute who have gone on to become very successful group leaders elsewhere. If you are interested in joining us for what I am sure will be a very exciting meeting, details for how to register can be found at www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/symposium/. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Institute was founded in 1989 to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and is situated in the middle of the area containing the biological science departments of the University of Cambridge, close to the newly-established Wellcome Trust Institute