Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green
Distinguished Visiting Professorship,
Honoring Women in Science and Medicine
Each year the Women in Science and Medicine Advisory Committee (WISMAC) selects and hosts an outstanding female scientist/physician to visit UT Southwestern for a two-day professorship. The Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship, Honoring Women in Science and Medicine was established by the Southwestern Medical Foundation in honor of the late wife of Texas Instruments founder Cecil H. Green, who died in 2003. Mrs. Green, who died in 1986, championed the cause of opening new career paths for women in science and provided a major bequest to Southwestern Medical Foundation. The Visiting Professorship promotes the accomplishments of women in science and medicine and provides inspiration to UT Southwestern's junior faculty and trainees. Our visiting professor meets with individuals and with diverse groups on campus and presents a University Lecture.
2008-2009 Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship
Carol Greider, Ph.D.
University Lecture February 4, 2009: "Telomerase and the Consequences of Telomere Dysfunction"
Carol Greider is the Daniel Nathans Professor and director of the department of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences. Her pre-eminent discovery of the enzyme telomerase and subsequent studies on telomere function in the cell have transformed the fields of aging and cancer research. As a graduate student in the laboratory of Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider first described telomerase in Tetrahymena, a pond-dwelling protozoan containing thousands of chromosomes. She continued on to extensively characterize the functional regions of Tetrahymena telomerase. With colleagues, she established a link between telomere length and replicative capacity of cells, and also provided important insight into the role of aberrant telomerase activity in cancer cells. More recently, Dr. Greider has been characterizing chromosome rearrangments in yeast to explore the genetic requirements for chromosome stability. Her laboratory has also generated telomerase null mice to dissect the role of telomere length in stem cell viability. Dr. Greider's research also has taken a clinical bent in studies of dyskeratosis congenita, a rare, inherited disorder related to stem cell failure.
Dr. Greider earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She began her postdoctoral studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., where she later became an associate investigator. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1997. Dr. Greider is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards including the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, which she shared with her former mentor, Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and with Jack Szostak, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School. [Posted December 28, 2007]
2009-2010 Southwestern Medical Foundation's Ida M. Green Distinguished Visiting Professorship
Joan S. Brugge, Ph.D. Professor and Chair, Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School
Visit is February 2-3, 2010; University Lecture on February 3, 2010
[Posted September 2008]
