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The Edward A. Kravitz Lectureship
June 15, 2009 - 8:00 PM, Speck Auditorium
"Building Boutons and Moving Mitochondria"
Tom Schwarz, Children’s Hospital, Boston and Harvard Medical School
Tom Schwarz is a Professor in the F. M. Kirby Center for Neurobiology at Children’s Hospital, where he uses genetic, molecular, and electrophysiological methods to study the cell biology of the neuron. The Schwarz lab makes extensive use of Drosophila genetics as well as mammalian neurons to probe the mechanisms of membrane transport and fusion, synapotogenesis and, most recently, of axonal transport. Tom was a graduate student of Ed Kravitz during the Carter and Reagan Administrations and has heard all Ed’s jokes dozens of times, but still laughs at them. He was subsequently a postdoc in the lab of Drs. Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (who rarely told jokes) where he worked on cloning the Shaker potassium channel and developed his abiding love for the fly. He moved back to Harvard in 2000 after 10 years on the faculty at Stanford.
Dr. Edward A. Kravitz is the George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He is a graduate of the City College of New York (B.S. in biology and chemistry) and The University of Michigan (Ph.D. in biological chemistry). His post-doctoral studies were at NIH with Drs. Earl Stadtman and P. Roy Vagelos. He went to Harvard Medical School in 1961, becoming a professor in 1969. Dr Kravitz’s research interests have centered on neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, and now focus on explorations of the role of such substances in aggression using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model organism. In earlier studies, Kravitz and his colleagues (Kuffler, Potter, Otsuka, Iversen, and Hall) were the first to demonstrate that GABA was a neurotransmitter, and with Tony Stretton was the first to demonstrate that an intracellular fluorescent dye could be successfully used to determine neuronal geometry. The Kravitz laboratory has published over 100 papers in first rank journals. Presently Kravitz is supported by grants from NIGMS for his research on aggression.
In addition to being a member of many professional societies including the International Society for Neuroethology where he became president in August 2004, Dr. Kravitz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, is a fellow of the AAAS, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards and honors, Dr. Kravitz is most proud of his Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring award from Harvard Medical School, and the Education Award from the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs.
Dr Kravitz has long-standing interests in education. He has served as the director of the MBL’s Neurobiology course, was the co-founder of the Neurobiology of Disease Teaching Workshops at the Society for Neuroscience, and the first director of the graduate program in neuroscience at Harvard University. He is committed to the education of minorities in the sciences and medicine.
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