|
Read
the New York Academy of Science Interview
with Dr. Roth.
[click
here]
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David
Roth is the Irene Diamond Professor of
Immunology at the Skirball Institute
of Biomolecular Medicine and Chairman
of the Department of Pathology at New
York University School of Medicine.
David was born in Houston, Texas but spent his teenage years in Anchorage,
Alaska. He earned his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Rice University,
where his father taught music (and forbade him to embark on a career as
a classical musician), and went on to earn both his MD and PhD degrees
at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Dave did his doctoral research
in the lab of John Wilson (famed for co-authoring The
Cell: A Problems Approach with Nobel laureate Tim
Hunt of Clare Hall), where he studied what we now know as nonhomologous
end joining (NHEJ) in mammalian cells and discovered a role for short sequence
homologies in the joining reaction. (We now view this as a signature of "alternative
NHEJ", a poorly understood back-up joining pathway.) He also suggested
that the nonhomologous end joining machinery plays a vital role in forming
the products of V(D)J recombination. David then became an HHMI post-doctoral
research fellow in the lab of Martin Gellert at
the National Institutes of Health.There he discovered that V(D)J recombination
proceeds via introduction of double-strand breaks into the chromosome.
He also discovered hairpin coding ends and showed that DNA-PK plays a pivotal
role in processing hairpin coding ends.
After
his postdoctoral training, David decided
to return to the collegial environment
of Baylor to start his own lab in 1993.
He became an Assistant Investigator with
the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute in 1997; an Associate
Professor in the Departments of Microbiology
and Immunology (now Department of Immunology),
Molecular and Human Genetics, Pathology,
and the Interdepartmental Program in Cell
and Molecular Biology in 1998; Director
of the Interdepartmental Program in Cell
and Molecular Biology in 2000; and a full
Professor in 2001.
During his sabbatical year 2001-2002 David visited the lab of Steve
West at the ICRF (now Cancer Research UK), just outside of London,
and immersed himself in Clare Hall’s outstanding recombination community
and South Mimm’s pubs (the two are co-extensive). Thanks in large
part to that stimulating experience, Dave decided to seek a program where
he could marry the benefits of being in a research institute to the advantages
of inhabiting a larger intellectual community beyond the medical school
environment — and he just happened to be invited to give a talk at
the Skirball Institute by Juan LaFaille. Dan
Littman, Steve Burakoff and the Irene
Diamond Foundation joined forces to recruit David, and the Roth
lab is now happily ensconced in the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular
Medicine.
After a year of transitio
n, Steven Burakoff persuaded David to submit
his cv to the search committee for the Chair of Pathology at NYU. Another
year went by, and he found himself no longer a candidate, but an actual
department chair (as of September 2004). In the past twelve months, the
Department has witnessed a number of changes: a vice chair on the clinical
side has been appointed (Joan Cangiarella, M.D.); the pathology residency
program has been revitalized (thanks to Aylin Simsir, M.D. and Denine Cimmons);
seven clinical and one basic science faculty have been hired (thanks to
everyone); a new Program in Experimental Pathology has been created; the
graduate immunology course has been reconceived (thanks to Mike Dustin,
Ph.D.); the medical school immunology course has become a student favorite
(as evidenced by David's Teacher of the Year award); a new graduate program
has been planned (lots of help from David Levy, Ph.D., Jonathan Melamed,
M.D., and Joel Oppenheim, Ph.D., among others); a new core lab for histopathology
has been established (directed by Cindy Loomis, M.D., Ph.D. and Tim Macatee);
the administrative infrastructure is being revamped (with the help of Susan
DiGeronimo-Wild); and the Roth lab gained a new grant, two new postdocs
and a senior scientist. We hope to report additional progress in the coming
months. |
