March 7, 2013

Harvard’s Seidman to speak at VU

Jonathan Seidman, Ph.D., who has made pivotal contributions to understanding the genetic basis of cardiomyopathy and other heart diseases, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on Thursday, March 14.

Jonathan Seidman, Ph.D., who has made pivotal contributions to understanding the genetic basis of cardiomyopathy and other heart diseases, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on Thursday, March 14.

Jonathan Seidman, Ph.D.

His lecture, which also is the Paul D. Lamson Lecture, will begin at 4 p.m. in 208 Light Hall.
Seidman, the Henrietta B. and Frederick H. Bugher Foundation Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, will discuss how “Next-generation sequencing has revolutionized cardiovascular genetics.”

Seidman and his colleagues have developed a sensitive messenger RNA profiling technology, called PMAGE, which can pick up even low-level mRNAs. The Seidman lab is using the technique to study the consequences of gene mutations in the heart.

After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Seidman did postdoctoral work in the lab of Philip Leder, M.D., at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development before joining the Department of Genetics at Harvard in 1981.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, Seidman shared the 2002 Bristol-Myers Squibb Award with his wife and scientific collaborator, Christine Seidman, M.D. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator from 1988 to 2005.

Seidman’s talk is sponsored by the Departments of Otolaryngology and Pharmacology. The Lamson lecture is named for the department’s first chair, the late Paul Lamson, M.D., who died in 1962.

For a complete schedule of the Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries/.