Faculty Appointment: Jason MacGurn, Ph.D.
I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Jason MacGurn, Ph.D., to the rank of Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology on the tenure track, effective August 1, 2013.
Jason is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow in Scott Emr’s Lab at Cornell University Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. He was jointly recruited by CDB, the Epithelial Biology Center, and the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center.
Jason has an outstanding record, with two publications in Cell and first-rate papers in EeLife, PLoS Pathogens, EMBOJ, the Annual Reviews in Biochemistry, Infection and Immunity, and Mol. Microbiol. He was a graduate student in the Tetrad program at UCSF, and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fleming Postdoctoral Fellowship, a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, and most recently a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. Using a combination of genetics, biochemistry, live cell imaging and proteomics, his work has contributed significantly to emerging paradigms of ubiquitin ligase substrate selection and its role in regulating membrane traffic. With another postdoc in Scott’s lab Jason discovered an entirely new family of adaptor proteins that control the internalization of specific membrane proteins – a breakthrough that was published in Cell in 2008. In a second Cell paper in 2011, Jason identified a new signaling pathway that controls these adaptors. Importantly, these adaptors are conserved in humans and there is reason to believe that they play roles in some forms of cancer.
