Topic:  Regulation of basal and inducible T cell antigen receptor signaling

Speaker: Dr. Arhtur Weiss

                Howard Hughes Medical Institute 
                Division of Rheumatology
                Department of Medicine, UCSF, San Francisco

Time: 14:00-15:30, April 17th (Mon.), 2017

Location: D326, Medical Science Building

Host: Dr. Xin Lin

Abstract:

Dr. Weiss received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University where he worked in the laboratory of Michael Edidin. He received his M.D and Ph.D. in Immunology at the University of Chicago. His dissertation work with Professor Frank Fitch focused on transplantation immunology. After a short postdoctoral fellowship at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland, he did his clinical training in internal medicine and in rheumatology at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). He did his postdoctoral training at UCSF with John Stobo which led to his interest in understanding signal transduction by antigen receptors. Dr. Weiss joined the UCSF faculty in 1985 and is currently the Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine at UCSF. He has also been an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1985. He served as Division Chief of Rheumatology at UCSF from 1988-2011 and also served as the Director of the MD/PhD training program.

Dr. Weiss studies signal transduction in the immune system. His early work helped define the signaling function of the TCR including the early demonstration that calcium increases resulted from antigen receptor signaling. Subsequent studies focusing on the function of the TCR oligomeric structure utilized chimeric receptors to reveal the signaling function of the TCR zeta chain. The use of this chimeric approach, a fundamental study to define TCR signaling function, led to the development of chimeric T cell antigen receptors that have yielded impressive results in adoptive immunotherapy in the clinic.His current work focuses on the roles of tyrosine kinases and phosphatases in regulating lymphocyte activation and how abnormalities in tyrosine phosphorylation pathways can lead to immunologically-mediated diseases.