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Faculty Candidate Talk: Soo-Kyung Lee, PhD
January 7, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Speaker: Soo-Kyung Lee, PhD
Talk Title: “What does the FOX say? FOXG1 orchestrates cortico-cortical connections”
About the Speaker: Soo-Kyung “Soo” Lee completed her B.S. degree in Pharmacy at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, Korea, and remained at Chonnam National University to earn her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. In 2001, she moved to the Salk Institute in San Diego for postdoctoral studies. She was appointed assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in 2004. Dr. Lee came to OHSU in 2010 as an associate professor in the Pediatrics department and was promoted to professor in 2014. She holds a joint appointment in the Vollum Institute.
The goals of Dr. Lee’s lab are to understand the gene regulatory mechanisms that govern generation of diverse neural cell-types with specialized function and connection pattern during central nervous system development and to understand how disruption of these processes leads to various neurodevelopmental disorders in humans.
About the Cluster Hire:
UW’s Cluster Hiring Initiative was launched in 1998 as an innovative partnership between the university, state and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). In its first phase, the initiative authorized nearly 50 “clusters” and nearly 150 new faculty through several rounds of hiring. In 2017, phase two of the Cluster Hiring Initiative was authorized with a goal of supporting at least 12 clusters.
A proposal by several Waisman Center investigators for a Functional Genetics/Genomics of Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Diseases cluster at the Waisman Center was selected by the UW-Madison Cluster Hire Initiative.
New faculty hires who are part of the Functional Genetics/Genomics of Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Diseases cluster at the Waisman Center will help develop a pipeline of discovery that begins with patients in the clinics and ends with new approaches for treatments or therapies. This cycle of translational research would start with identifying patient-specific genetic variants, and then continue through experimental studies to confirm whether these variants truly cause disease. Ultimately, new panels for diagnosis and new approaches for treatment may be discovered.
