Amon to present Distinguished Biomedical Scholar Lecture

The Carver College of Medicine’s 2015-2016 Distinguished Biomedical Scholars Lecture Series continues Thursday, May 5, with a talk by Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Angelika Amon, PhD. Amon’s talk, “The Causes and Consequences of Aneuploidy,” is co-sponsored by the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. It will be held at 4:00 p.m. in the Prem Sahai Auditorium (1110 MERF).

Amon graduated from the University of Vienna with a Bachelor’s degree in biology and completed a PhD in biology there as well. Following a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute, Amon was named a Whitehead Fellow and founded the Amon Lab. In 1999, Amon joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Cancer Research and was named the Howard S. and Linda B. Stern Career Development Professor. Today, she is the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor of Cancer Research at MIT.

The Amon Lab at the David Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT investigates the networks that regulate the segregation of chromosomes during cell division. This requires an understanding of not only normal cell division, but also the uncontrollable cell division that leads to disease. The lab’s work is largely concerned with aneuploidy, which is the result of serious cell division error that causes cells to have too few or too many chromosomes. Understanding the causes and consequences of aneuploidy is critical for deciphering the basis for many human diseases. Inaccurate chromosome segregation during meiosis is the leading cause of miscarriages and a major cause of birth defects, such as Down syndrome. Aneuploidy, specifically, is associated with birth defects and a key characteristic of cancer. Analyzing aneuploidy suppression could therefore provide invaluable insight into the process of tumorigenesis.

Amon received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers shortly after joining MIT. She has since received a number of other honors, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, and the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award. Amon is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. She was awarded the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine in 2013.

Story Source: Benji McElroy, UI Carver College of Medicine, 200 College of Medicine Administration Building, Iowa City, Iowa 52242

Media Contact: Jennifer Brown, UI Health Care Marketing and Communications, jennifer-l-brown@uiowa.edu