Thursday February 27^th 2014 at 16.00 hrs.

Gorlaeus laboratories, Cell Observatory

Drinks after the lecture

Controlling gene expression fluctuations during development

Speaker: Alexander van Oudenaarden (Hubrecht, UMC, MIT)

Alexander van Oudenaarden performed his PhD research in the field of experimental solid state physics at Delft University.  He has been a postdoc at Stanford University (Biophysics).

He is Director of the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and Utrecht Medical Center, Utrecht) from 2012 on. He is a professor at the Faculty of Science, Utrecht University from 2013 on. He still is a professor at MIT (Cambridge, USA) in the Department of Biology  and the Department of Physics and an extramural faculty member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT (he has been the director of the NIH/NCI funded Physical Sciences Oncology Centre at MIT).

His group “Quantitative biology of development & stem cells” is using a combination of experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches to quantitatively understand decision-making in single cells with a focus on questions in developmental and stem cell biology. His group is particularly interested in how cells use gene networks to make robust decisions even in the presence of significant fluctuations in gene expression.