Join NESM for our annual Spring Meeting on Thursday, March 8th at Olympus in Waltham, MA (48 Woerd Avenue Waltham, MA, 02453)! The meeting will consist of facility tours, two technical talks and a buffet dinner. We look forward to seeing you there!
Meeting Schedule
5:00 PM - Registration & Facility Tours
6:00 PM - Dinner
6:50 PM - Welcome
7:00 PM - Dr. Conor Evans
7:35 PM - Dr. Shashank Shekhar
8:10 PM - Closing
Speaker:
Dr. Conor Evans, Wellman Center for Photomedicine 
Pharmacokinetic Tomography: Quantifying Topical Drug Uptake with Advanced Microscopy
Drug discovery, formulation development, and generic drug development all require detailed knowledge regarding the uptake and action of molecules. However, the majority of pharmaceutical agents are small molecules that cannot be tagged with traditional imaging agents without significantly altering both their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Advancement microscopy methods, including coherent Raman and fluorescence lifetime imaging, are tools that can overcome these limitations for the quantification of drugs in tissue. We will show that, when paired with image analysis tools, pharmacokinetic tomography can reveal important information on the uptake of topical agents in the skin.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Evans is currently an assistant professor in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine of Harvard Medical School at MGH. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University and performed his post-doctoral research in the applications of advanced microscopy to cancer research. His lab's research interests are focused on the development of translation of optical microscopy and spectroscopy tools to the clinic. Dr. Evans has developed a number of imaging methodologies and is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award.
Dr. Shashank Shekhar, Brandeis University
Ménage à trois – How capping protein and formins together control filopodial size and dynamics
The actin cytoskeleton is essential for mechanotranduction which requires polarized assembly of actin filaments. Filament barbed ends are the “hotspot” of actin assembly regulation and are targeted by many regulatory proteins. While Formins bind growing ends of an actin filament and processively accelerate filament elongation, Capping Protein (CP) blocks filament growth. Using a novel in vitro microfluidics-assisted single filament and single molecule imaging approach, we have recently demonstrated how formins and capping protein simultaneously bind filament ends in a ternary complex. The complex formation at the barbed ends is sufficient for a quantitative description of both spatial and temporal regulation of filopodia.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Shekhar is currently a joint post-doc between the Gelles, Goode, and Kondev labs at Brandeis University where he is developing high resolution microfluidics assisted TIRF techniques. He received his Ph.D. in Nanobiophysics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He then received post-doctoral training in the Cytoskeletal Dynamics Group at the CRNS in France before moving to the United States where, in addition to his current position, he was a visiting scientist at the MBL in Woods Hole, MA and a Whitman Early Career Fellow.
