December 1, 2009 - Trainees, meet Donna Vogel of the Professional Development Office!

We'll take a break from paper presentations on December 1 and will have a special event for trainees in the reproductive biology labs (PIs welcome too!). Dr. Donna Vogel from the Professional Development Office will come to meet with us. Donna is an MD-PhD with special ties to reproductive biology. From 1987 to 2001, she was a program director in the Reproductive Sciences Branch of NICHD. (In fact, I got to know her when she was the program officer for my first NIH grant, my NRSA post-doctoral fellowship! Some of you might know or have heard of other program directors at NICHD, such as Dick Tasca, Susan Taymans, and Stuart Moss; these are people doing the sort of NIH job that Donna used to do.) Donna next worked with the NCI, with a focus on post-doctoral fellowship programs, then was Deputy Director of the Ellinson Foundation. In 2007, she came to Hopkins and back to her passion of training and mentoring, to head the PDO.

Donna will visit on December 1 to give us a taste of her take on career development, to discuss upcoming offerings of the PDO (especially a course, called Your Research Career, coming up in January), and to answer any and all questions about science, grants, NIH, career, life, and everything. This will be a great chance for trainees to meet Donna in this small, informal setting … and as she will tell you, you can never network too much! Oh, and you should also ask her about Jeopardy! – she was a contestant and made it to the Tournament of Champions!

Nov. 17, 2009 journal club

Leesa from the Drummond-Barbosa lab will be presenting (our first presenter from that lab!). And although this isn't our first presentation on the ovary, it's been a while! The last one I remember was when we hit on the ovarian germline stem cell controvery in 2006. Interestingly, we'll be coming back to one aspect of this part of ovarian biology with:

Tsc/mTORC1 signaling in oocytes governs the quiescence and activation of primordial follicles, Human Molecular Genetics, in press
Adhikari et al.

This work also has some interesting human health relevance, as Leesa's comments note ...
"A woman's reproductive lifespan is thought to be partially determined by the number of primordial follicles she has at birth. Primordial follicle are maintained in a quiescent state until puberty, at which point they begin to develop into ova and that 'biological clock' starts ticking away. Menopause occurs when the pool of follicles becomes exhausted. But what happens if the clock starts ticking too early? This paper from the Liu lab in Sweden investigates the signaling pathways necessary to maintain primordial follicles in a resting state in mice and finds that insulin and TOR signaling are both necessary, but not sufficient for this process. Over-activation of either pathway leads to premature ovarian failure, or POF. This study is of particular relevance to my work in the Drummond-Barbosa lab. A female Drosophila's reproductive lifespan is determined by how long her ovarian germline stem cells, or GSCs, can be maintained in the niche to produce eggs. Our lab has demonstrated that both insulin signaling and TOR signaling levels (both highly conserved pathways in structure and function) are required for GSC maintenance, and perturbation of either pathway leads to POF. Hope to see you there!"