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Dr Melanie Eckersley-Maslin – Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

08/11/2024 9:00 am - 08/11/2024 10:00 am
Location
Davis Auditorium

WEHI Special EDD Seminar hosted by Dr Hamish King

 

Dr Melanie Eckersley-Maslin

Group Leader and Snow Fellow – Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Research Fellow in the Dept of Anatomy and Physiology – The University of Melbourne

 

Preparing the genome for the future: insights from development and cancer

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

 

Dr Melanie Eckersley-Maslin is a Group Leader and Snow Fellow at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and a Research Fellow in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne.

Her lab investigates epigenetic plasticity in development and cancer to explore how cell identity is established in embryos yet deregulated in cancers, with the ultimate aim to identify new therapeutic targets. Melanie completed her PhD in Molecular Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s School of Biological Sciences in New York, USA with Professor David Spector before postdoctoral research in developmental epigenetics with Professor Wolf Reik at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge UK supported by an EMBO Fellowship, Marie Curie Independent Fellowship and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Discovery Grant. In 2021, Melanie returned to Australia to establish her research lab supported by the Lorenzo and Pamela Galli Medical Trust. She is recipient of the 2020 MetCalf Prize for Stem Cell Research, a 2021 Snow Medical Research Fellowship and the 2023 Lorne Genome Millennium Prize.

It is remarkable how a single genome can encode the wide diversity of cell types found in multicellular organisms. This is largely facilitated by diverse chromatin states that regulate accessibility of the underlying DNA sequence, helping to define current cell identity, but also shape how cells respond to external cues such as differentiation or stress. The epigenetic plasticity of a cell describes how flexible this regulation is. Our lab’s focus is on understanding the dynamics, regulation and functional significance of epigenetic plasticity using both developmental and cancer models. By discovering the principles driving epigenetic plasticity in development, we can further our understanding of how this goes awry in cancer, leading to new areas for therapeutic intervention.

 

 

 

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