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2008 Dean’s Postdoctoral Prize Lecture: Sergio Peisajovich Sergio
Peisajovich is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Wendell Lim,
where he is currently studying how evolution re-wires complex signaling
networks. He led the 2007 UCSF team that finished among the top-6 finalists
in the Synthetic
Biology Annual Competition (iGEM) organized by MIT. The goal of the iGEM
competition, which in 2007 included 54 teams from all over the world, is to
demonstrate that biology, although very complex, can be approached as an
engineering discipline. The UCSF team led by Sergio included other 15
members, 6 of which were high school students from public schools in the Bay
Area. The team chose to engineer cellular spatial localization, by taking the
first steps towards the creation of a synthetic organelle. Their
work was recently featured in an article on the UCSF
Today website and in the San
Francisco Chronicle. Novel compartments within eukaryotic cells
would be ideal for isolating synthetic biology processes that involve fragile
or toxic compounds, such as the cellular production of drugs or
biofuels. Sergio
represents the type of scientist that the Dean’s Prize Lecture was
established to recognize. He is “an outstanding postdoc” who was
nominated and chosen for the Dean’s prize because of his commitment to
research and because he sets a wonderful example of a scientist who
contributes to the overall scientific community. He was “a superb
mentor to the team members” and “was the intellectual force behind the design
of the synthetic organelle that was so well received at this year’s competition”. This
year a second prize was awarded to Andrew Ewald, a postdoctoral fellow in
Zena Werb's lab, who is studying normal and neoplastic epithelial growth and
invasion. He combines 3D organotypic culture with confocal timelapse
microscopy and pharmacologic and genetic interventions to determine the cell
behavioral basis of epithelial growth and invasion and the regulation of cell
behaviors by matrix metalloproteinases and Rac and Rho GTPases. His
movies reveal a novel mechanism for collective cell movement in which the
epithelium grows through dramatic, reversible changes in proliferation,
tissue architecture, and epithelial polarity, but without many of the classic
features of cell motility such as forward oriented protrusive activity.
He is currently extending his work on normal morphogenesis to mouse models of
breast cancer and to 3D organotypic cultures of primary human mammary
epithelium. Please
direct inquiries to: Abigail Kroch, Director, Office of Postdoctoral
Education: krocha@medsch.ucsf.edu.
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Sergio Peisajovich
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