Description:

The Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine (CCSM) at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine is pleased to announce a guest lecture by John B. Hogenesch, Ph.D., Professor and Vice Chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

John Hogenesch did his graduate work with Chris Bradfield at Northwestern University working on signal transduction pathways mediated by bHLH-PAS transcription factors. In his thesis work, he used sequence analysis to discover new members of the bHLH-PAS family, including Hif1a, Hif2a, Hif3a, Bmal1, Bmal2, and Npas2 (Hogenesch et al., JBC, 1997; Hogenesch et al, J. Neuroscience, 2000). Characterization of Bmal1 showed that it partnered with Clock, a master regulator of circadian rhythms, (Hogenesch, et. al, PNAS, 1998), to form the positive arm of the circadian clock. Later work showed that Bmal1 is the only required clock component (Bunger et al., Cell, 2000).

In 1999, he joined Steve Kay and Peter Schultz at Novartis La Jolla as a postdoc, then scientist (2000), then Director of Genomics (2002). At Novartis, building on interests in informatics and genome biology, he worked on the assembly of the complete human transcriptome (Hogenesch et al., Cell, 2001), as well as on the mRNA characterization of the transcriptomes of human, mouse, and rat (The Gene Atlas, Su et al, PNAS 2002; Su et al., PNAS, 2004). Collectively, these papers have ~ 4000 citations and stand as important landmarks in genome biology. These interests evolved into high throughput hypothesis testing and the development of genome wide methodologies for the study of cellular pathways using cDNAs and siRNAs (Conkright et al., Molecular Cell, 2003; Sato et al, Neuron, 2004 ; Willingham et al., Science, 2005; Sato et al., Nature Genetics, 2006).

In 2006, Dr. Hogenesch joined the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and is now Professor and Vice Chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics and Associate Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics. His interests continue to include genome biology and its application to understanding circadian behavior. Currently, Dr. Hogenesch is a Penn Fellow, sits on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Qiagen, Bio-Rad, the Ryan Light Sang Foundation Medical Committee, and the Gene Ontology (GO) consortium, and is an advisor to several National Institutes of Health, NIDDK, NCI, NHLBI.