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The Nancy S. Rafferty Lectureship
7/20/10 - 9:00 AM, Speck Auditorium
"Stem cells and mouse development"
Janet Rossant, The Hospital for Sick Children
Dr. Janet Rossant is a Senior Scientist and Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. She is also a University Professor, University of Toronto, and Professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics and the Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology, University of Toronto. Her research interests center on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse embryo using both cellular and genetic manipulation techniques. Her interests in the early embryo have led to the discovery of a novel placental stem cell type, the trophoblast stem cell. She is Deputy Scientific Director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network and she directs the Centre for Modelling Human Disease in Toronto, which is undertaking genome-wide mutagenesis in mice to develop new mouse models of human disease.
Dr. Rossant trained at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, United Kingdom and has been in Canada since 1977, first at Brock University and then at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, from 1985 to 2005. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Societies of London and Canada and a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2007, Dr. Rossant was awarded the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology.
Dr. Rossant is actively involved in the international developmental biology community. She was an editor of the journal Development for many years and she was President of the Society for Developmental Biology in 1996 to 1997. She has also been involved in public issues related to developmental biology, most recently serving as chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research working group on stem cell research and as a member of the National Academies Stem Cell Guidelines Panel.
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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