Research Seminar: “Development of axons and synapses”

Speaker: Yimin Zou, PhD, Professor of Neurobiology, University of California, San Diego

Talk Summary: Axon guidance and synapse formation are two important steps of nervous system development. Work from Dr. Yimin Zou’s lab lead to the discovery that the Wnt family morphogens are conserved axon guidance cues which provide directional instruction and positional information for axon pathfinding and topographic organization. His lab went on to show that a non-canonical Wnt signaling pathway, planar cell polarity pathway, is responsible for recognizing and responding to Wnt gradients. More recent work showed that planar cell polarity signaling components are essential regulators of glutamatergic synapse assembly. Mutations of these signaling components, are associated with a number of brain disorders, including autism and epilepsy.

About the Speaker: Yimin Zou received his Bachelor’s degree in Genetics from Shanghai Fudan University in 1988 and PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1995 from University of California, Davis and San Diego.  He did postdoctoral training with Marc Tessier-Lavigne at University of California, San Francisco and started his own laboratory at the University of Chicago in 2000. He was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at the University of Chicago in 2006 and moved to University of California, San Diego in the same year. He was promoted to full professor at UC San Diego in 2011 and became the Vice Chair of the Neurobiology Section in 2012 and served as the Chair of the Neurobiology Section from 2014-2017.

Hosted by Pat Levitt, PhD, Simms/Mann Chair in Developmental Neurogenetics, Institute for the Developing Mind, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, WM Keck Provost Professor of Neurogenetics, Keck School of Medicine of USC 

RSVP is Required to tecpad@chla.usc.edu