After a PhD from the University Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris) with Dr. M. Méchali at the Jacques Monod Institute (Paris, France), and a post-doctoral training at NIH (Bethesda, USA), Geneviève Almouzni established her group at the Curie Institute (Paris, France). Since 1999, she is Head of Department "Nuclear Dynamics and Genome Plasticity" at the Institut Curie (Paris, France), involved in coordinating networks of research within Cancéropôle (France) and at the European level concerning Epigenetics and is Head of Training Unit at the Institut Curie.

She has been interested into the interrelationships between nuclear organisation and the DNA metabolism, including DNA replication repair and transcription. The unifying theme underlying her work is the wish to understand the principles governing nuclear organization and functions. A key issue is how these events are coordinated in order to ensure the maintenance of a cellular identity throughout cell divisions. This is a central question for the field of Epigenetics. A special emphasis is given to developmental context and genotoxic stress to appreciate the importance of factors involved in chromatin dynamics (CAF-1, HIRA, ASF1, histone modifying enzymes). Her interest in the 3D organization of the cell nucleus is aimed at understanding how specific domains like pericentric heterochromatin can be stably maintained. The implications for pathological diseases like cancer are considered throughout the approaches.

In 1996 Dr. Amon accepted a position as a Whitehead Fellow. During her tenure as a Whitehead fellow, Dr. Amon’s laboratory investigated the mechanism of chromosome segregation in budding yeast. Specifically, her lab identified the protein that triggers chromosome segregation by inducing the degradation of a chromosome segregation inhibitor called Securin.

In 1999, Dr. Amon joined the faculty of the Department of Biology and the Center for Cancer Research at MIT. In 2000, she was selected to become an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2002, Dr. Amon was promoted to Associate Professor and awarded tenure in 2004. At the Center for Cancer Research Dr. Amon, studies the molecular mechanisms governing mitotic and meiotic chromosome segregation. In particular, her lab deciphered the molecular mechanisms that control the final stages of mitosis and discovered the molecular mechanisms that generate the meiotic chromosome segregation pattern.

In recognition of her contributions towards understanding the molecular mechanisms of mitotic and meiotic chromosome segregation Dr. Amon was awarded several prizes. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2003 she was awarded the Alan T. Waterman award. This award is supported by the National Science Foundation and recognizes the most promising young researcher in any field of science or engineering. In the same year she also won the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award. The Eli Lilly Award is the American Society for Microbiology’s oldest and most prestigious prize and rewards fundamental research of unusual merit in microbiology or immunology by an individual on the threshold of his or her career. Dr. Amon is also the 2007 recipient of the ASBMB-Amgen Award, which is awarded to investigators for significant achievements in the application of biochemistry and molecular biology to the understanding of disease.

Presently, he is Deputy Director of the Cancer Center, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Oncology. He is also Chief of the Cancer Biology Division of the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, and Associate Director for Research of The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. He has been a member of committees of the American Cancer Society and of NIH, and his honors include a Research Career Development Award from NIH, the Edwin Astwood Lectureship of the Endocrine Society, and appointment to the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professorship in Cancer Research and most recently the 2009 Kirk A. Landon-AACR Prize for Basic Cancer Research, also shared with Peter A. Jones, PhD. He is the recently gave 2010 Brecher Lecture at UCSF.

So far, during his highly productive career, Stephen Baylin has authored or co-authored over 300 full-length publications.

His long-term interests have been in the structure and function of the cell, particularly the nucleus. His earliest studies involved the giant lampbrush chromosomes and the amplified nucleoli found in oocytes of frogs and salamanders. In collaboration with his graduate student Mary Lou Pardue, he developed in situ hybridization, now one of the most widely used techniques in cell and developmental biology. Studies on the protozoan Tetrahymena with his postdoctoral fellow Elizabeth Blackburn led to the discovery of the repeated GGGGTT sequence that characterizes the telomeres of most eukaryotic organisms. Most recently Dr. Gall has focused on the structure and function of nuclear bodies, especially the Cajal body and histone locus body.

Dr. Gall was elected president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 1967 and received its E. B. Wilson award in 1983. He was a member of the Corporation (trustee) of Yale University, 1989-1995. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2006 he received the Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Research and in 2007 the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize.

Dr. Gasser's research interests focus on how nuclear organization impinges on mechanisms of repair and replication fork stability and on epigenetic inheritance of cell fate decisions. Her laboratory combines genome-wide mapping, synthetic lethal screens, quantitative live fluorescence imaging, biochemical reconstitution and standard yeast molecular genetics to address these questions at the molecular and cellular levels. In questions of stem cell determination and epigenetic inheritance, the Gasser group works with C. elegans, to study the
effects of nuclear organization on gene expression during well-characterized cell differentiation events. She has authored more than 200 primary articles and reviews over the last 30 years and has received a number of prizes for her work. Susan M. Gasser studied at the University of Chicago (B.A. Honors in Biophysics) and at the University of Basel (PhD in Biochemistry). She did her postdoctoral studies with U.K. Laemmli at the University of Geneva. She has served on numerous review boards and advisory councils throughout Switzerland and Europe, and served for 3 years as chair of the EMBO Council.

Robert D. Goldman, PhD, is the Stephen Walter Ranson Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Dr. Goldman received his PhD in biology from Princeton University and carried out postdoctoral research at the University of London and at the MRC Institute of Virology in Glasgow. He served on the faculties of Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie-Mellon University and was a Visiting Scientist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory prior to joining Northwestern. He is widely recognized as an authority on the structure and function of the nucleoskeletal and cytoskeletal intermediate filament systems. In the early 1980s he became fascinated with the discovery that lamins were the nuclear form of intermediate filaments. Since that time, his research laboratory has shown that the lamins are involved in determining the size and shape of the nucleus and that they are critically important factors in the disassembly and reassembly of the nucleus during cell division. Within the nucleus, the lamins assemble into a molecular scaffold that plays a vital role in DNA replication, transcription and chromatin organization. In recent years his interest in the lamins has focused on the impact of a number of lamin A mutations that give rise to the premature aging disease Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome and other atypical forms of progeria. This has led his research into areas determining the roles of lamins in chromosome organization and positioning during interphase, in regulating the epigenetic modifications of chromatin and in replicative senescence. Dr. Goldman is a recent past President of the American Society for Cell Biology, Director of the Whitman Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory, and he has received a number of honors and awards, including an Ellison Foundation Senior Scholar Award and a MERIT award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Steitz spent the next three years in postdoctoral studies at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where she used early methods for determining the biochemical sequence of RNA to study how ribosomes know where to initiate protein synthesis on bacterial mRNAs. In 1970, she was appointed assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale, becoming full professor in 1978. At Yale, she established a laboratory dedicated to the study of RNA structure and function. In 1979, Steitz and her colleagues described a group of cellular particles called small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs), a breakthrough in understanding how RNA is spliced. Subsequently, her laboratory has defined the structures and functions of other snRNPs, such as those that guide the modification of ribosomal RNAs and several produced by transforming herpesviruses.

Steitz is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. Her many honors include the U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology (1982); the National Medal of Science (1986); the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award (2002); the FASEB Excellence in Science Award (2003); the RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award (2004); E.B. Wilson Medal (2005); Gairdner Foundation International Award (2006); Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame Award, and the New York Academy of Medicine Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science (2008); Honorary Fellow of The New York Academy of Medicine (2009). She is the recipient of 13 honorary degrees.