³§±è±ð²¹°ì±ð°ù:Ìý Elliott Hagedorn, Ph.D.
91¸£Àû the speaker: Elliott Hagedorn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. His research group utilizes a combination of genetics, genomics and advanced live cell imaging in zebrafish to study how cells and particles in the bloodstream move into and out of different tissues and organs. He is originally from southern Indiana and was an undergraduate at Purdue, Indiana’s largest public university. He received his PhD from Duke University for his work with David Sherwood on basement membrane transmigration in C. elegans. He was subsequently an HHMI Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation and Instructor in Pediatrics in the laboratory of Leonard Zon at Boston Children’s Hospital. Elliott has taught in courses at Purdue, Duke, Harvard, Boston University and at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. For the past 5 years his group has led the BU-BMC Summer Science Scholars program, an outreach program for local high school students. His research has been funded by the Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies and by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
³§±è±ð²¹°ì±ð°ù:Ìý Gwen Beacham, Ph.D.
Gwen Beacham is a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University. Originally from Maine, she did her undergraduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Maine. She received her PhD from Cornell University for her work in Gunther Hollopeter’s lab studying clathrin-mediated endocytosis using C. elegans as a model system. As a postdoc in the Hagedorn lab, she is leveraging her scientific background in cell biology and endocytosis, in conjunction with the unique experimental toolkit of the zebrafish, to investigate the function of endothelial scavenger receptors in the hematopoietic niche. In the long-term, she aims to lead her own independent research group investigating the regulation of vascular endocytosis in the establishment and maintenance of organ-specific endothelial barriers.
91¸£Àû the seminar: Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) form during embryonic development and sustain lifelong production of blood and immune cells. The fetal HSPC niche is thought to provide a supportive microenvironment during development that is essential for proper stem cell function. To date, however, its functional requirement has not been tested directly. In mammals, the fetal niche resides in a vital organ, the liver, whereas in zebrafish, it is housed in a vascular plexus in the larval tail called the caudal hematopoietic tissue. In this seminar, we will present our work using the zebrafish model to both mechanically and genetically dissect the function of the fetal hematopoietic niche. Our results collectively support a model where the fetal niche, in particular the specialized scavenger endothelial cells within this tissue, are required for the proper, balanced development of hematopoietic stem cells and erythroid progenitors. In the long-term, our work could inform new strategies for culturing and expanding HSPCs for use in clinical contexts such as bone marrow transplantation.
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Please join us for this in person event in 107 Norman Smith Hall.
