Learn about cancer and immune system interactions as well as cancer therapies from a University Medical Center expert in a series of eight free lectures beginning Saturday, Jan. 12.
During the sixth annual Charles B. Huggins Lecture Series, cancer and immunology specialist Judy Cannon, a postdoctoral fellow in Medicine, Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care, will talk about how knowing the immune system can help doctors and patients better understand and treat cancer. (Chronicle, January 2008)

The fellowship includes a 10 to 12 week internship at Abbott Laboratories. Liu also won the Committee on Cancer Biology Ehrman Award which recognizes senior students working in the field of cancer biology. His advisor is Dr. Piers Nash.

The University of Chicago and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have launched a new Interdisciplinary Scientist Training Program (ISTP) to train graduate students at Chicago and HHMI's new Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Loudoun County, Virginia. The goal of the program is to combine the exceptional academic resources of the University and the highly interdisciplinary research environment of Janelia Farm to train "well-prepared, highly committed, and gifted studets" in the biomedical sciences. The University is one of two partner institutions for the new program, the other being Cambridge University, and the first student began his study in the fall. "Graduate study in biology needs to change," said Dr. Harinder Singh, HHMI investigator and Louis Block Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, who is directing the Chicago program. "We need to give students interdisciplinary training and take advantage of multiple mentors." (The Imprint, Fall 2007)

Harinder Singh, Chicago's Louis Block professor of molecular genetics and cell biology, has developed an approach that models the cell-fate mechanism as a circuit, much as an engineer design an electrical circuit. But where an electrical circuit might map how a light is turned on or off, Singh's circuit maps how genetic triggers turn on gene sets that determine whether a cell becomes a macrophage or neutrophil. Described in an August 2006 Cell, Singh's first cell-fate circuit holds broad promise, he says, that could help create entirely new cell types for therapeutic purposes.
The circuit--a mathematical model of the cell-fate mechanism--was developed using data from an elaborate experimental system. "In biology, generally speaking, people are experimentalists," says Singh, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "We need to better integrate theoretical analysis with the traditional experimental analysis we've been doing in the past." (The University of Chicago Magazine, July-August 2007).