Life Sciences Institute opens for science with nine faculty aboard

September 2, 2003
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ANN ARBOR—The Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan is announcing four new faculty as it begins moving into its 230,000 square-foot lab facility in the heart of the campus this month.The new Life Sciences Institute laboratory facility.”This is an exciting time for the institute,” Director Alan Saltiel said. “Our vision of a unique multidisciplinary unit working together to solve important problems is beginning to take shape. The building is dazzling, and the faculty are a diverse group of creative, energetic scientists who will get this bold new venture off to a terrific start.”

The LSI is a new unit of the University that will house faculty from many academic departments. Its laboratory facility is designed to encourage teamwork and the cross-pollination of ideas.

The new LSI hires include two recruits from other institutions and two distinguished U-M researchers. This exciting group of collaborators joins Saltiel, David Ginsburg, Dan Klionsky, John Lowe and Rowena Matthews.

Once full, the LSI expects to have 20 to 30 principal investigators and up to 350 total employees. Recruiting efforts continue to identify potential faculty candidates. The new additions include:

Kun-liang Guan, 40Guan is a biological chemist who examines the critical reactions that regulate cell division, growth and differentiation. His studies focus on a class of enzymes that act as molecular switches to control a variety of activities in cells, crucial to understanding disease states such as cancer, arthritis and diabetes. In 1998, Guan was recognized with a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, more commonly known as a “genius grant.” He joined the U-M faculty in biological chemistry in 1991.

Anuj Kumar, 34Kumar is a systems biologist who surveys large numbers of genes and proteins, seeking a bigger picture of nature’s operation. His model organism is the Baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a single-celled workhorse of cell biology that shares a remarkable number of features with higher organisms, including humans. “The yeast is actually a really good model for a single human cell,” Kumar said. By identifying genes that are active at certain times in the yeast lifecycle and tracking the localization of their encoded proteins within the cell, Kumar has so far discovered 137 new genes in yeast, and made important observations about their functions. He has just completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University and has been appointed assistant professor in molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

Gabby Rudenko, 36Rudenko is a biochemist and will be joining the LSI in spring 2004 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where she works in the lab of Johann Deisenhofer, a Nobel laureate and Howard Hughes Investigator. Last year, she published a paper in the journal Science that describes the structure of the LDL (bad cholesterol) receptor, the result of six years of painstaking work on a difficult problem that could lead to new preventative strategies for heart disease. Her new work will focus on other receptor proteins, especially those that regulate the plasticity of the brain. She will be appointed assistant professor in pharmacology in the Medical School.

Zhaohui Xu, 36 Xu is a structural biologist in biological chemistry in the Medical School. He studies interesting proteins known as molecular chaperones, which help newly made proteins fold into the proper shape and reach their destinations within the cell. He came to Michigan in 2000 as a Biomedical Scholar and is currently a Pew Scholar.

In addition to the nine LSI investigators, several scientists from the U-M Medical School will be temporarily housed in LSI lab space while they await the completion of the Biomedical Sciences Research Building in 2006. Their residence in LSI helps the Medical School with its current space crunch and ensures that the new LSI is being fully used for higher efficiency.

The institute complex is the cornerstone of the University’s campuswide effort to retain its leadership in life sciences research and teaching. Adjacent to the institute will be an undergraduate science building with labs and offices for science education and a commons building that includes offices for the new Bioinformatics Program, a small conference facility, and a food court to encourage contact and collaboration between students and faculty on the central and medical campuses.

For more on the Life Sciences Institute, visit www.lsi.umich.edu