Richard Byrne is a post-doctoral fellow at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, currently at the College as part of the Copeland Colloquium.
Administered by the Dean of Faculty's Office, it provides scholars with an opportunity to pursue their field of study for a semester at the College. Four or five Fellows are selected annually from any discipline to work with each other as well as College faculty and students.
Fellows receive a stipend of $8,500, living accommodations, meals, a travel allowance and research support. Candidates for the program are nominated by faculty members, acting as mentors and advisors, who share a similar field of interest.
Byrne's faculty sponsor, Biology professor Dominic Poccia, introduced Byrne at the presentation.
"Richard is now a post-doc in the laboratory of a former student of mine through the Five Colleges," said Poccia. "We have collaborated for a number of years. We have been working together and published together for the last couple of years."
The nuclear envelope plays a major role in regulating gene expression, nuclear signal transduction and nuclear transport. Irregularities in the nuclear envelope have been associated with muscular dystrophies, cancers and Progeria, a rare condition that causes accelerated aging.
"Now our knowledge of the nucleus and the various substructures in the nucleus is much greater. Our understanding of the nuclear envelope has also increased," said Byrne. "What is not known at [the] moment is how the nuclear envelope irregularities are actually related to the diseases."
Byrne addressed the structure and function of the nuclear envelope before delving into the data that his research has yielded.
"There is a barrier that encloses the nucleus of every cell. Every cell in your body has this barrier that encloses the nucleus," explained Byrne. "Every time a cell divides, this barrier has to break down and reform again in the two new cells produced. So when that barrier reforms again-that sort of process is quite poorly understood. That is what we are interested in finding out about."
For humanities majors, Poccia's analogy might be helpful: "The structure that is forming through membrane fusion is really like what happens when two soap bubbles come together to make a larger soap bubble. If you repeat that over and over again you get a very large structure from a lot of small structures. And the membrane is very much like the surface of the soap bubble separating the inside and the outside. And all chromosomes in these cells are on the inside of the structure. Every time the cell divides, it has to reconstruct that."
"By coming here I first of all have the chance to engage with students in seminars and also on a practical level, on a day-to-day basis," said Byrne. "Also there are techniques performed in Professor Poccia's lab here that we don't do in London, so part of my coming here is so that I can learn those techniques as well and take them back to London."
All biology department seminars are on Mondays in Merrill 4 at 3:30 p.m.