Loss Lecture Explores How Cell Research Informs Disease Treatment
Dr. Jeremiah Zartman, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver the annual Loss Lecture at St. John Fisher University.
Free and open to the public, the lecture will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, in Cleary Family Auditorium in Kearney Hall.
At Notre Dame, Zartman holds a concurrent position in the Biological Sciences Department and serves on the leadership team as a co-principal investigator and co-director of the Biology Integration Institute EMBRIO, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). He also serves as a review editor of Biophysical Journal. Zartman has led a research group at Notre Dame since 2012, focusing on integrating computational and experimental approaches to engineer multicellular systems and developing advanced in vivo screening approaches for target discovery in cancer and regenerative medicine.
During the lecture, Zartman will discuss how his research seeks to identify the fundamental principles that govern how cells communicate and coordinate their behavior to organize themselves into functional organs.
This research provides new perspectives on the causes of tissue degeneration and cancer. His laboratory uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches to reverse-engineer pattern formation and tissue morphogenesis, growth control, and regeneration to inspire new ways to treat human diseases and to accelerate wound healing and regeneration. The research also leads to the discovery of new targeting approaches for treating a broad range of diseases and a better understanding of the rules governing organ development.
In the first part of the talk, Zartman will highlight interdisciplinary collaborations, describing the formulation and experimental validation of a multi-scale computational model that has generated new mechanistic insights into the control logic of morphogenesis.
In the second part of the lecture, he will discuss efforts to reverse-engineer how the mechanosensitive ion channel Piezo impacts cellular processes in multicellular systems.
Zartman received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a dual major in chemical engineering and engineering physics in 2004. In 2009, he obtained a doctoral degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Princeton University as a Princeton Hertz Fellow. From 2009 to 2011, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Molecular Life Sciences as an EMBO long-term post-doctoral fellow. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2016 and was selected for the Rising Star Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering division in 2018.