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The Nancy S. Rafferty Lectureship
7/5/08 - 9:00 AM - Speck Auditorium
"Early Morphogenesis of the Amphibian Embryo"
Ray Keller, University of Virginia
Ray Keller grew up on a dairy farm in southeast Missouri, received a B.S. in Biology from Southeast Missouri State University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois. He did postdoctoral work with J.P. Trinkaus at Yale University and with Robert Briggs at Indiana University. He joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1980 and moved to the University of Virginia in 1995 where he is the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professor. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biology (1999-2004), Program Director of the NIH Developmental Biology Training Grant, and is Co-Director of the Morphogenesis and Regenerative Medicine Institute.
His laboratory is known for analysis of the cellular, molecular and biomechanical basis of gastrulation and neurulation in amphibians, particularly the convergent extension movements that function prominently in shaping the vertebrate body plan. The laboratory contributed to the use of high-resolution imaging of cell motility in tissues and embryos, to the biomechanical analysis of embryonic morphogenetic forces and tissue material properties, to use of specialized explants to assay cell behavior, and to development of the concept of cell intercalation as a morphogenetic process. In addition to his research, he teaches an advanced undergraduate developmental biology laboratory, and he has taught in the Embryology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, and in the Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor.
The Nancy S. Rafferty Lectureship
in Embryology has been established to recognize Dr. Rafferty’s long career in eye research. Dr. Rafferty was instrumental in elucidating the ultrastructural relationship between lens accommodation and actin filament arrays in mammals and amphibians.
Dr. Rafferty received her M.S and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois in 1953 and 1958, respectively, under the tutelage of Dr. S. Meryl Rose. Following her dissertation work, Dr. Rafferty completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University, where she subsequently served as assistant professor in the department of anatomy in the School of Medicine. In 1970, she and her husband Keen moved to the Chicago area, where she joined the department of anatomy at Northwestern University Medical School. She was promoted to professor in 1976.
During her career, Dr. Rafferty published 55 journal articles and 31 abstracts. She served on study sections of the National Institutes of Health and was a member of the Vision Advisory Research Committee. Dr. Rafferty traveled the world giving invited talks in Great Britain (Guy’s Hospital Medical School, Nottingham University, Oxford University and Edinburgh University), East Germany, Holland, Spain, Canada, Japan, Australia, San Francisco, Finland, and Sweden.
Dr. Rafferty first came to the MBL in 1955 as a student in the Embryology course. She returned periodically to conduct research at the MBL beginning in 1988. Upon retirement from Northwestern in 1994, she moved her laboratory to MBL where she was a Senior Scientist and a member of the Corporation.
Dr. Rafferty and her husband long felt a love for the MBL and Woods Hole. She would have been particularly pleased that a lectureship in embryology has been established in her name.
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