Special guest speaker Dr. Harvey Lodish, a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institue of Technology, will be sharing his experience as an academic entrepreneur.
About the speaker:
Dr. Harvey Lodish earned his Ph.D. at the Rockefeller University in 1966 and was a postdoctoral fellow with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He has isolated and cloned numerous surface membrane proteins that play a role in blood development, cell signaling, glucose transport, and lipid metabolism. A Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute, he joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and has been a Professor of Biology since 1976 and a /Professor of Biological Engineering since 1999. Dr. Lodish is also the lead author of the widely used textbook Molecular Cell Biology. The book has been translated into 14 languages and the ninth edition appeared in January 2021.
Dr. Lodish is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology, an Associate (Foreign) Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium. During the 2004 calendar year, he also served as President of the American Society for Cell Biology. Dr. Lodish received the 2010 Mentoring Award from the American Society of Hematology, the 2016 American Society for Cell Biology WICB Sandra K. Masur Senior Leadership Mentoring Award, the 2016 Pioneer Award from the Diamond Blackfan Anemia Foundation, and the Metcalf Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Experimental Hematology in 2020.
Dr. Lodish was a founder and scientific advisory board member of Genzyme, Inc., Arris Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc. In 2014, together with Flagship Ventures, he started Rubius, a now public company developing genetically modified human red blood cells for multiple therapeutic indications. Together with two parents of children with Dravet Syndrome, he founded Tevard, a company developing novel gene therapy therapeutics for several genetic brain and other disorders. And with two former students, he founded Carmine, which develops red cell extracellular vesicles as gene delivery vehicles. He has also served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Eisai Research Institute in Massachusetts and on the Scientific Advisory Board of Astra and then AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals.
