Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Ph.D., whose pioneering imaging techniques have helped reveal the surprisingly fast-paced inner life of the cell, will deliver the next Flexner Discovery Lecture on Thursday, April 18.
Her lecture, “Breakthroughs in Imaging Using Photoactivatable Fluorescent Proteins,” will begin at 4 p.m. in 208 Light Hall. It is sponsored by the Epithelial Biology Center as part of the Epithelial Biology Symposium.
Lippincott-Schwartz is chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Lippincott-Schwartz began her career in cellular imaging while working toward her doctorate in Biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-1980s.
As a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Richard Klausner, M.D., then at NICHD, “she continued to debunk popular notions of static, unchanging organelles,” according to a 2009 profile published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
First with green fluorescent protein (GFP), and then with more sophisticated imaging techniques, she and her colleagues have been able to visualize the three-dimensional organizations of minute structures and spaces in the cell, and track the motions of single molecules in densely packed populations of proteins.
“Cells and systems have evolved to be dynamic processes, and this evolutionary principle should guide our inquiries,” she told PNAS.
For a complete schedule of the Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.
