Speaker

Amy Gladfelter is a quantitative cell biologist interested in fundamental mechanisms of cell organization.  She is currently a Duke Science and Technology Professor in the Cell Biology and Biomedical Engineering Departments at Duke University.  Previously she was Professor of Biology and Associate chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2016-2023.  She remains a longstanding fellow of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.   In her research program, she use microscopy, biophysical and genetic approaches to study syncytial cells.  Syncytia are cells with many nuclei sharing a common cytoplasm and are found in fungi, throughout the human body such as in muscles and in the placenta as well as in many plants. In her work she examines how these large cells spatially organize the cytoplasm via biomolecular condensates and sense their shape.  She trained at Princeton University (AB) with Bonnie Bassler, Duke University (Ph.D.) with Danny Lew and UniBasel Biozentrum (post-doc) with Peter Philippsen before starting her independent career at Dartmouth in the Biological Sciences department in 2006, where she was until 2016.  She has been honored with the 2014 Graduate Mentoring Award from Dartmouth, the 2015 Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research from the American Society of Cell Biology, the 2020 Graduate school mentoring award from UNC and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.  She is an elected fellow of AAAS, the America Academy of Microbiology and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

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