GSP Mini-Retreat

This year’s Genome Stability Program mini-retreat was a success thanks to program coordinators, Mariarosaria De Rosa and Kaylee Ermine (Zhang lab). Leading off the virtual talks, Ryan presented “Telomeric 8-oxoguanine Drives Premature Senescence Independent of Telomere Shortening”. The list of other presenters included Namrata Kumar (Van Houten lab), Sarah Hengel, PhD (Bernstein lab), Angela Hinchie (Alder lab), Megan Mahlke, PhD (Nechimia-Arbely lab), Denise Risnik, PhD (Zhang lab), Thong Luong (Bernstein lab), and Raquel Buj-Gomex, PhD (Aird lab).

The Keynote speaker this year was Graham Walker, PhD. He is an American Cancer Society & HHMI Professor of MIT, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Walker holds an R35 NIEHS merit award and researches therapeutics that inhibit mutagenic translesion DNA synthesis to sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy. His talk, “Unravelling Mutagenic Translesion Sythnesis: A Journey from the Ames Test to Cancer Chemotherapy” was met with great enthusiasm from the group.

Thank you to Dr. Walker for taking the time to deliver a great talk to our group, and thank you to Mariarosaria and Kaylee for organizing a great mini-retreat!

Dr. Graham Walker