[QSB-grads] Molecular mechanisms of Inflammation and Cellular Death (faculty job talk, SAFI)

[Andy LiWang]

Dear QSB Faculty,
I would like to bring to your attention a faculty job candidate that may be of interest to you. She is a highly experienced biochemist who studies inflammation and cell death. It would be great if we could make a strong showing at her job talk (please read more details below).

Andy
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Event Start: 03/15/2017, 02:30 PM
Event End: 03/15/2017, 04:00 PM
Event Location: Classroom & Office Building-2, COB-2 392
Title:
SAFI Seminar Series: Understanding disease: Molecular mechanisms of Inflammation and Cellular Death

Location:
Classroom & Office Building-2, COB-2 392

Date:
Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Start Time:
2:30 p.m.

End Time:
4:00 p.m.

Details:
Dr. Eva de Alba will be discussing how chronic inflammation is at the core of many diseases of increasing prevalence, ranging from autoimmune disorders to life-threatening diseases such as diabetes, cancer and atherosclerosis. The factors responsible for chronic inflammation extend from early life and psychosocial stressors, obesity and lifestyle, to environmental and biological cues such as cellular imbalance and molecular anomalies. Thus, the design of strategies to prevent and treat this ample array of inflammation-related disorders requires an interdisciplinary effort that combines epidemiologic, psychosocial and developmental studies, with biochemical, biophysical, molecular and cellular biology approaches. An essential step towards these efforts involves the identification and characterization of the molecular and cellular mechanisms in control of the onset and resolution of inflammatory processes.

At the cellular level, inflammation is triggered by the formation of a protein oligomeric platform known as the inflammasome, followed by programmed death of immune cells. De Alba will share recent findings pertaining the modus operandi of key proteins involved in the molecular mechanisms that lead to inflammasome formation and programmed cell death, that she has unveiled using advanced biophysical techniques with a major focus on high-resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. In particular Dr. de Alba will discuss the structure, dynamics and interaction capabilities of the inflammasome adapter ASC and one of its common targets, the pathogen-recognition receptor NLRP3, together with results explaining the conformational and binding behavior of intrinsically disordered members of the Bcl-2 family controlling cell death. Data will be presented in relation to structural models accounting for protein interactions in inflammasome formation and cell death, and discussed in terms of how the key interacting protein interfaces can be used as potential targets of therapeutic strategies for inflammasome inhibition.

Dr. Eva de Alba is a principal investigator of the National Center for Biotechnology of Spain’s National Research Council (CNB-CSIC). De Alba earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), carried out postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and remained at NIH as staff scientist for another 6 years before joining the faculty at CNB-CSIC. De Alba’s general research interests revolve around understanding the molecular mechanisms that are the fulcrum of vital cellular processes whose dysfunction results in disease. In particular, Dr. de Alba studies the molecular processes that regulate inflammation and programmed cell death from a biochemical, biophysical and bioengineering perspective, with the goal of providing the foundations to understand the role of inflammation in neurological and cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune disorders and cancer, and to help in the development of novel therapeutic strategies for treatment. De Alba’s work has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, among others.
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