BME7900 Seminar - Chun Han, PhD

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Location

Weill Hall 226

Description

We welcome the next speaker in our series, Dr. Chun Han. Dr. Han is from Cornell's Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, where he is an Associate Professor. He is also applying for field membership with the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering. Deciphering Dendrite Morphogenesis through Quantitative Manipulation and Measurement ABSTRACT: How do neurons give rise to diverse branching patterns that are characteristic of their neuronal identities? Ultimately, a mechanistic understanding of branching morphogenesis requires mathematical modeling based on quantitative approaches for experimental manipulation and morphological measurement. The availability of such approaches for in vivo neuronal systems has been a major bottleneck in the field. My lab has been using Drosophila dendritic arborization (da) neurons as an in vivo system to investigate dendrite branching morphogenesis. This system is remarkably amenable to live imaging and genetic manipulation. Over the last a few years, my lab has developed several useful approaches and tools towards quantitative manipulation and measurement of dendrite growth and morphology. These include long-term time-lapse neuronal imaging, quantitation of dendritic branching pattern and dendrite growth dynamics, and optogenetic manipulations of cellular events in neurons. These progresses together give us unique advantages for deciphering the secrets of dendrite branching morphogenesis. In this seminar, I will give an overview of our approaches but will focus primarily on how our optogenetic tools allow us to control cell signaling and microtubule-based transport in neurons by light. BIO: Chun Han received a BS degree in Cell Biology and Genetics from Peking University, China in 1999. He obtained his Ph.D. training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Dr. Xinhua Lin’s lab, where he studied morphogen gradient formation during animal pattern formation. Fascinated by the complex and beautiful dendritic structures of Drosophila da neurons, he joined the lab of Dr. Yuh Nung Jan as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, San Francisco in 2006 to study the cell biology of these neurons. He became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular biology at Cornell University in November 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. Using da neurons and other neuronal systems in Drosophila, his lab studies how neurons develop diverse dendrite morphologies by receiving signals from their microenvironment and how neurons interact with phagocytes during neurodegeneration. His lab also has a keen interest in developing new techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9 and optogenetics, for more sophisticated manipulation of gene functions in Drosophila.