Grand Opening

• Event Calendar
• Directions and Maps
• Sponsorship Opportunities

Symposium

• Our Speakers
• Symposium Schedule
• Symposium Registration

Stay Informed

For more information, contact:
Carol A. Corigliano
Business Development Assoc.
Phone: 716.881.8906
Email: cc253@buffalo.edu

Speakers Bios

Tom Blumenthal, Ph.D.

Tom Blumenthal graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1966. He was an NSF fellow during his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University from which he received his PhD in bacteriophage genetics in 1970. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellow with James Watson at Harvard, where he showed that bacteriophage QB replicase contains protein synthesis elongation factors. In 1973, he became an Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where he remained until 1996, rising through the ranks to Professor and Chairman of Biological Sciences. In 1980, as a Guggenheim fellow, he did a sabbatical with Sydney Brenner at the MRC in Cambridge, where he began working on the nematode C. elegans. He studied developmental gene regulation and later began his current projects on mechanisms of splicing and chromosomal gene organization. In 1993 he did a sabbatical with Barbara Meyer at Berkeley where he worked on C. elegans 3’ splice site recognition. In 1997, he moved to the University of Colorado School of Medicine as Chairperson of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. Dr. Blumenthal will become Chairperson of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in July 2006.

Dr. Blumenthal is currently on the Editorial Board of the journal, RNA, and the on-line book, Wormbook; he has served on the Boards of Directors of the American Medical and Graduate Departments of Biochemistry, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the Scientific Advisory Board of Wormbase, the C. elegans database; he is currently on the RNA Society Board of Directors and is a member of the University of California Science and Technology Committee and the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Biological Science Divisions of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Dr. Blumenthal’s research currently concentrates in the areas of mechanisms of pre-mRNA processing in C. elegans and how that relates to organization of genes on chromosomes. The lab works on how 3’ end formation and trans-splicing are coordinated on polycistronic pre-mRNAs. Working in the C. elegans model system, Dr. Blumenthal’s lab discovered the first eukaryotic operons, now known to exist in many other phyla, even including primitive chordates. Many of the 1200 known operons in the C. elegans genome encode functionally related proteins, and the lab is concentrating on using the operons to uncover previously unknown functional relationships. He has published over 100 papers and one book in the areas of genetics and molecular biology.