Dr. Janet Rossant to be keynote at 2011 Activated Egg Symposium
We’re delighted to report that Dr. Janet Rossant, Professor of Molecular Genetics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Toronto, and Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children has graciously agreed to be our keynote speaker for the 2011 Activated Egg Symposium to be held Nov 4, 2011, at the Henderson House in Weston, MA.
Dr. Rossant is internationally recognized for her pioneering research in mouse genetics. Her major findings are related to the question of how genetically identical cells adopt distinct characteristics during embryo development.
In 2010, she received the Premeir’s Summit Award, and they made this video:
A little about more about Dr. Rossant:
Janet Rossant grew up in the UK and trained at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. When still a graduate student, she conducted now-classic work defining cell lineages and cell fates in the early mouse embryo. In 1977 Dr. Rossant moved to Canada and joined the faculty at Brock University. From 1985 to 2005, she was a researcher at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. She joined the Hospital for Sick Children in 2005 and became the first female Head of its Research Institute since its founding in 1954. She is also a University Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.
Throughout her career, she has been a pioneer in manipulating the mouse embryo, deriving novel stem cell lines and interrogating the mouse genome. Most recently, building on her ongoing studies of the mouse blastocyst and the stem cells that arise from it, she is applying her developmental biology skills to derive definitive endoderm lineages from human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells.
As Chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research working group on stem cell research and as Deputy Scientific Director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network, Dr. Rossant continues to play a leadership role in setting Canada’s public policy regarding stem cell research.
She has received many accolades for her research, including being elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London (2000), and a Foreign Associate of the National Academies of Science, USA (2008). She was awarded the McLaughlin Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (1998), Eli Lilly/Robert L. Noble Prize from the National Cancer Institute of Canada (2000), Killam Prize for Health Sciences (2004), and FASEB Excellence in Science Award (2004). She received the 2007 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology along with the late Dr Anne McLaren, and the 2007 Conklin Medal of the Society for Developmental Biology, of which she is a Past President.
Here’s another video biography by the Toronto Region Research Alliance in April, 2009:
