Event poster
Some of the world's leading experts in cell biology will gather at the University of Alberta on May 27 and 28 for Frontiers in Cell Biology, a Canada Gairdner Symposium. Richard Rachubinski, chair of the Department of Cell Biology in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and co-organizer of the event with Richard Wozniak, hopes University of Alberta students, faculty members and the general public will take full advantage of the symposium.
"This is a unique opportunity for people to come and see not only some of the established leaders who have contributed over the decades, but also the up-and-coming leaders in the world, like Anne Spang and Irmi Sinning," says Rachubinski. "It's unprecedented."
The symposium will start on a high note with a presentation by keynote speaker Günter Blobel, the sole winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His presentation will revolve around the advancements he has made in his Nobel-winning research, namely discussing how proteins move between the nucleus and the rest of a cell.
Beyond Blobel, Frontiers in Cell Biology will also offer presentations from many more leaders in the field, including Christopher Dobson, master of St. John College at Cambridge University; Yoshinori Ohsumi, 2015 Canada Gairdner International Award winner; John Bergeron, co-founder of both the McGill University/Genome Quebec Innovation Centre and Caprion Proteomics; and Arthur Horwich of Yale University and Peter Walter of the University of California, San Francisco, recipients of Lasker Awards, often considered as "America's Nobels."
Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology and also a Lasker Award recipient, will give a public lecture on personalized medicine-the movement of "one size fits all" medicine to treatment specialized for each individual. This lecture will be one of the most accessible during the symposium.
"He's going to be talking more generally why we study things at the basic level so we can have better treatments for the future," Rachubinski explains. "This is the future: personalized medicine, specific medicine and molecularly controlled medicine. You have to understand how things function at a very, very detailed level to be able to actually personalize medicine."
Rachubinski is proud to note that all of the speakers were enthusiastic to appear at the University of Alberta and emphasizes that the event is not just for aficionados or experts in cell biology. "This is for everybody," he says. "It's a wonderful thing to see how the basic discoveries over the last 30 years or more have translated into an understanding of the future of medicine and medical intervention."
Registration for the event is free but space is limited. Those interested in attending the event must register on the Eventbrite page by May 13.