Description:

4th Annual Robert D. Goldman Lecture
Cosponsored by Walter S. And Lucienne Driskill Graduate Program Lectures in Life Sciences and Feinberg School of Medicine Department of Cell & Developmental Biology

Featuring Keynote Lecture by:
Joan Brugge, PhD
Professor of Cell Biology
Director of the Ludwig Center
Harvard Medical School, MA

Robert D. Goldman, PhD

Robert D. Goldman, PhD, is the Stephen Walter Ranson Professor Emeritus of Cell and Developmental Biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he served as chair of the department from 1981-2019.

Dr. Goldman earned his doctorate in biology from Princeton University, after which he trained as a postdoctoral fellow at   Hammersmith Hospital in London and at the MRC Institute of Virology in Glasgow. He was appointed assistant professor of Biology at Case Western Reserve University in 1969 and moved to Carnegie Mellon University in 1977, prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern.

Dr. Goldman is a pioneer in the area of cytoskeletal research. He was among the first to recognize a new class of cytoskeletal filaments with diameters of ~10nm, between actin microfilaments and microtubules. These filaments, now referred to as intermediate filaments (IF) are now appreciated to comprise over 70 genes, mutations in which lead to at least 72 different human disorders. Dr. Goldman’s observations in the early 1980s that IF antibodies stained the nuclear rim foreshadowed the discovery that nuclear lamins are a nuclear form of IF, shifting much of his lab towards understanding the various functions of this essential protein family. His work over the years has helped us understand multiple human disorders including Hutchison-Gilford progeria and giant axonal neuropathy, devastating childhood diseases caused by defects in IF function.

Beyond his many discoveries at the lab bench, Dr. Goldman has also made key contributions to the community of science and science communication and education. He is founding director of the Science Journalism Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts which ran from 1990-2008, and was the first director of the MBL’s Whitman Center for Visiting Research. He served as director of the MBL Physiology Course, which spawned fundamental discoveries like the existence of cyclins and kinesins. In addition to being a member of numerous advisory and editorial boards he is also a past president of the American Society for Cell Biology. He has published more than 400 publications on IF, is the recipient of an NIH MERIT Award, and was elected Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Society for Cell Biology and the Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters.