Control and Regulation of Stem Cells with Ruth Lehmann Interviewed by Jan Witkowski

Born in Cologne, Germany, Ruth Lehmann studied Drosophila embryology and genetics with Gerold Schubiger’s at the... » More

Born in Cologne, Germany, Ruth Lehmann studied Drosophila embryology and genetics with Gerold Schubiger’s at the University of Washington, Seattle and with the late Jose Campos-Ortega at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where she described the neurogenic genes in Drosophila. During her doctoral thesis in the laboratory of Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, Germany, she characterized maternal effect genes that organize the embryonic axes in Drosophila. After postdoctoral training in Tuebingen and at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK in the laboratory of the late Mike Wilcox, she joined the Whitehead Institute and the faculty of MIT in 1988. Molecular characterization of nanos, pumilio and oskar in her lab showed that RNA localization within a cell is tightly linked to translational regulation.

In 1996, Dr. Lehmann moved to the Skirball Institute at NYU School of Medicine where she is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Chair of Developmental Genetics. Here her work has focused on the mechanisms that regulate germ cell specification, migration and survival in the embryo and germ line stem cell maintenance in the adult. In recent studies, her lab demonstrated the role of lipid signaling in germ cell migration and identified the genetic basis of transcriptional silencing in primordial germ cells and the mechanisms that control homeostasis of germ cell proliferation.

Dr. Lehmann is also the director of the Helen and Martin Kimmel Stem Cell Center and the Director of the Skirball Institute at NYU School of Medicine. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts Sciences and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

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