The International Regulome Consortium

The Steering Committee

• Michael Rudnicki (mrudnicki@ohri.ca) is a Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and a Professor of Medicine at uOttawa. He is the Director of the Sprott Centre for Stem Cell Research and is Scientific Director of the Stem Cell Network. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Genetics, is an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Rudnicki's lab has made many seminal discoveries concerning the function of regulatory genes that regulate myogenic stem cell proliferation and differentiation. As Scientific Director of the IRC, he chairs the Steering Committee and reports to the IRC Board of Directors. He will be responsible for all aspects of the Canadian project.

• Irwin Davidson (irwin@titus.u-strasbg.fr) is the Director of Research at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in France and Staff Scientist in the Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes/IGBMC. He was the initiator of the French research network for the IRC. His laboratory was the first to investigate the function of TAFs in signaling and developmental processes in mammalian systems in vivo. Davidson will lead the French effort including supervision of gene targeting and mouse production in collaboration with researchers Pierre Ferrier, Jacques Samurut and others.

• Jack Greenblatt (jack.greenblatt@utoronto.ca) is an Ann and Max Tannenbaum Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Greenblatt has conducted pioneering research on protein-protein interactions and on fundamental mechanisms that regulate gene expression in bacteria, viruses, yeast, and human cells. He will lead the Toronto team performing high-throughput analysis of TF complexes by mass spectrometry.

• Frank Grosveld (f.grosveld@erasmusmc.nl) is Professor of Cell Biology and Genetics and Director of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. His work has primarily focused on the regulation of transcription of the human globin genes. He also has an active interest in the development of the haematopoietic and nervous systems. He is the leader of EuTRACC, and is the direct supervisor of the Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics groups at Erasmus University.

• Ihor Lemischka (ihor.lemischka@mssm.edu) is a scientist at Mount Sinai in New York. He has been studying stem cells for 20 years and has remained one of the world's leading innovators in the area since he was the first to show in the 1980s that a single blood-producing stem cell in bone marrow, a hematopoietic stem cell, could rebuild the entire blood system in a mouse whose blood system had been destroyed. Recently, his lab has employed high-throughput microarray and RNAi approaches to investigate transcriptional networks in mESC. Lemischka will participate in the IRC by validating the findings in mESC.

• Bing Lim (limb1@gis.a-star.edu.sg) is the Associate Director at the Genome Institute of Singapore. In addition, he is the Senior Group Leader for the Stem Cell and Developmental Biology Group, co-coordinating the Transcriptome mapping project. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician, Beth Israel Hospital. His primary interest is in embryonic stem cells - identifying and understanding the role of genes important both for maintaining the pluripotent state and differentiation as well as investigating the role of micro-RNAs in the differentiation process. Lim leads the Singapore team.

• John Mattick (j.mattick@imb.uq.edu.au) is a Professor of Molecular Biology and the Director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at the University of Queensland in Australia. Formerly, Mattick was the Foundation Director (1996-2002) of the Australian Genome Research Facility, a major national research facility for high-throughput DNA sequencing and analysis. Today, his main research focus is on the role of introns and noncoding RNAs in the evolution and development of complex organisms, and by extension the programming of organized complex systems. Mattick leads the Australian team.

• Mahendra Rao (mahendra.rao@invitrogen.com) is the Vice-President Research, Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Invitrogen noe Life Technologies. Rao has published more than 100 papers on stem cell research in his time as both scientist and educator. Most recently, he served as Section Chief for Stem Cells and Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Neuroscience for the National Institute on Aging--a division of the National Institutes of Health. He holds an M.D. from Bombay University in India and a Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology. Rao leads the Invitrogen team that is participating in the IRC.

• Janet Rossant (janet.rossant@sickkids.ca) is a University Professor in the Departments of Medical Genetics and Microbiology and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Toronto and Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She is a world leader in mouse molecular genetics and studies lineage commitment during early development. Rossant will lead the Toronto team performing high-throughput gene targeting and providing expertise for gene targeting in ES cells and the creation of mice with tagged transcription factor genes.

• William Skarnes (skarnes@sanger.ac.uk) is a Senior Investigator with the Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, in the United Kingdom. He is PI of EuCOMM where "gene trapping" in mice will be systematically applied to identify functionally important genes. Skarnes will be responsible for supervision of gene targeting and mouse production, coordination of bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics, generation of ES cell lines harboring mutations in mouse transcription factors using gene trapping and gene targeting approaches, epitope-tagging mouse transcription factors in ES cells, and identification and characterization of ES cell phenotypes in vitro. Skarnes leads the UK team.

• Frances Stewart(stewart@mpi-cbg.de) leads a German stem cell consortium involving ten principal investigators. He is a Senior Scientist at the Dresden University of Technology. DiGToP focuses on how mutations cause disease using proteomic mapping.

• Robert Tijan (tijcal@berkeley.edu) was appointed President of the Howard Hughes Medical institute in 2008. Prior to this appointment he was a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. He has been an HHMI investigator since 1987. Dr. Tijan is interested in the biochemistry of gene regulation in humans and animals. In particular, he has investigated the molecular machinery that controls the turning up and down of gene expression in human cells, and how disruption of this highly regulated process leads to various disease states.