Annual GPILS Lectureship | Previous Speakers
2007: David GinsburG, MD, James V. Neel Distinguished University Professo
r of Internal Medicine & Human Genetics, Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Medicine, and a charter member of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan Medical School. Since 1994 he has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and in 2007 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. For the past 25 years, David Ginsburg has dedicated his career to understanding the clotting system and how it maintains its delicate balance in preventing blood loss. He has identified several genes in the clotting pathway and characterized the causes of a variety of inherited versions of coagulation diseases, which together afflict millions of people.
Dr. Ginsburg's talk was titled "Whole Genome Approaches to Cardiovascular Disease" .
2008: Claire Fraser-Liggett, Ph.D., President and Director of The Institute for Genomic Research was the speaker at our inaugural lectureship. Dr. Fraser has played a role in the sequening and analysis of human, animal, plant and microbial genomes to better understand the role that genes play in development, evolution, physiology and disease. 
She led the teams that sequenced the genomes of several microbial organisms, including important human and animal pathogens, and as a consequence helped to initiate the era of comparative genomics. She has served on a number of National Research Council committees on counter-bioterrorism, domestic animal genomics, polar biology, and metagenomics. Dr. Fraser-Liggett has more than 220 scientific publications, and has served on committees of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health. She received her PhD in pharmacology from State University of New York at Buffalo.
Dr. Fraser-Liggett's talk was titled “Metagenomics studies of human microbial communities in health and disease.”
Dr. Fraser-Liggett is now the Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
2009: Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., Director, Sage Center for the Study of Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Michael Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating how the brain enables the mind. Over the course of several
decades, a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres. In addition to his position in Santa Barbara, Professor Gazzaniga is also the Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is also the author of the recent book "The science behind what makes us unique" by Michael Gazzaniga, Ecco/HarperCollins Publisher (2008).
Dr. Gazzaniga spoke on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 4pm in the School of Nursing's large auditorium. The title of his lecture will be "The Law and Neuroscience."