Welcome

The next MLMC is scheduled for July 9-20, 2012 at McGill University in Montreal.

WAITING LIST FOR FULL COURSE
SPOTS FOR THE MORNING LECTURES STILL AVAILABLE

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Questions or comments: Please contact the MLMC organizing committee at montreal.lmc@gmail.com.

2012 Keynote Speaker

Paul Kulesa, PhD

Associate Professor and Director of Imaging/KulesaLab
Stowers Institute for Medical Research

'Visualizing dynamic multiscale events in the embryo'

Wednesday, July 18th, 7PM, Martin Theatre, McGill University McIntyre Building

Followed by a reception (Free but registration required)

If you are not participating in the MLMC, please register for the keynote here.

The frontier of biology and medicine is being defined by our ability to decipher the mechanisms that underlie basic phenomena. These phenomena may include well coordinated, complex cell migration and cell division events as an embryo sculpts a population of cells into distinct structures. Although significant advances in imaging technology now allow visualization of single cell behaviors in the living embryo, it has become clear that collection of accurate multiscale data in the same in vivo model system will greatly impact our ability to study basic phenomena.

Here, I will discuss our recent advances to develop an in vivo biological imaging platform that permits the collection of multiscale data during complex events in the living chick embryo. To follow collective cell migration events in more detail, I will describe our design of multispectral imaging strategies that more accurately trace complex cell trajectories that intersect, using a cell's spectral profile for identification in addition to shape and brightness. To link cell migration and cell division events, I will discuss our recently developed fluorescent reporter system that allows a dynamic readout of cell cycle progression. Lastly, I will show how collection of cell dynamics data can be combined with laser capture microdissection to provide a readout of gene expression data.

By combining these distinct strategies, our goal is to obtain multiscale data of cell position, cell-to-cell contact, cell cycle, and gene expression profile within the same embryo model system. I will discuss these concepts within the framework of our studies of cancer metastasis.

About the Speaker

Dr. Paul Kulesa was a Sloan Foundation and Burroughs Wellcome Fund postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Prof. Scott E. Fraser. He received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Washington, under Prof. J.D. Murray. Dr. Kulesa joined the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in 2003 and is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Imaging. His research goals are to better understand the mechanisms that regulate cell migration in the developing vertebrate embryo and to determine the relevance of these signaling pathways in the control of tumor cell invasion and reprogramming of the metastatic phenotype, using the neural crest model system. His interdisciplinary approach includes manipulation of cells and tissue within the avian embryo, visualization of individual fluorescently labeled cell behaviors and computational modeling to integrate theory and experiment.