Yamashita To Deliver 2023 Pittman Lecture
Dr. Yukiko Yamashita of MIT and the Whitehead Institute will deliver the annual Margaret Pittman Lecture titled “Unexpected Mechanisms of Germline Immortality” on May 3 at 2 p.m. ET.
This lecture will be held in person in Lipsett Amphitheater, Bldg. 10, and online at https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=46077.
Yamashita, a past MacArthur fellow, is the inaugural incumbent of the Susan Lindquist chair for women in science at Whitehead Institute. She is known for her studies of two fundamental aspects of multicellular organisms: how cell fates are diversified via asymmetric cell division and how genetic information is transmitted through generations via the germline.
She studies these processes using the Drosophila male germline and recently has embarked into a new area of inquiry, the functions of satellite DNA—so-called “genomic junk”—and how this might be involved in speciation.
The lecture, part of the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS), honors the legacy of Pittman, the first female laboratory chief at NIH. Continuing medical education credits will be available. More information about WALS is posted at https://oir.nih.gov/wals.—Diana Gomez