Awarding the third Estée Lauder Epigenetics Fellowship Award, in honor of Paolo Sassone-Corsi
The Paolo Sassone-Corsi Lectureship is presented and organized by the Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism. This year’s speaker is Michael Greenberg, PhD, Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His talk is titled “How nature and nurture conspire to control brain development and function”.
Location: Sue Gross Auditorium
Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences
856 Health Sciences Quad
Irvine, CA 92697
Date: October 20, 2025, 5:00PM – 8:00PM
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Agenda:
5:00 pm – Reception and Hors d’Oeuvres
5:30 – 8:00 pm – Lecture and Award Presentation
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About the Paolo Sassone-Corsi Lectureship:
Paolo Sassone-Corsi, PhD (1956-2020), was UC Irvine Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry and director of the campus’s Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism. During his significant scientific career, he made seminal discoveries in the field of gene expression and signal transduction in the 1980s and later on circadian clocks and metabolism. Dr. Sassone-Corsi was regarded as a true pioneer by the scientific community. Honoring Dr. Sassone-Corsi’s legacy, the Paolo Sassone-Corsi Lectureship features a renowned epigenetics researcher and brings together outstanding scientists and students to carry on the conversations and discoveries that inspired him.
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Michael Greenberg, PhD, the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Wesleyan University in 1976. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Rockefeller University in 1982 and carried out his postdoctoral research at New York University Medical Center. After joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1986, he served as the founding Director of the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital until 2008 then served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at HMS until 2022.
As a postdoctoral fellow at NYU in 1984, Dr. Greenberg made the seminal discovery that growth factors induce the rapid and transient expression of a family of genes whose functions are critical for cell cycle progression and neuronal differentiation. Since then, his research has addressed the mechanisms and function of the activity-dependent gene program in neurons during development, plasticity, and in disease states. Dr. Greenberg’s discoveries of synaptic activity-dependent gene transcription, the key intracellular signaling pathways underlying stimulus-transcription coupling in neurons, and gene expression programs that mediate neuronal development and plasticity, have contributed greatly to our understanding of brain development and function and how diseases of cognition such as autism spectrum disorders arise when these processes go awry.
In recognition of his contributions to neuroscience, Dr. Greenberg has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and he has received numerous awards including the J. Allyn Taylor International Price in Medicine (with Dr. Roger Nicoll), the Julius Axelrod Award, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, a Jacob Javitz Neuroscience Investigator Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (with Dr. Carla Shatz), and the Brain Prize (with Dr. Christine Holt and Dr. Erin Schuman). He is also widely regarded as a leading mentor and advisor for a generation of neuroscientists, and for this he has been honored with the A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring and the Harold Amos Faculty Diversity Award.
Dr. Greenberg is married to Dr. Rosalind Segal, and the couple has two children, Rachel and Daniel.
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Title: How nature and nurture conspire to control brain development and function
Abstract: Experience-dependent neuronal activity plays a critical role in shaping the connectivity and function of the central nervous system. These actions are mediated in part by the action of a program of neuronal activity-driven gene expression. Investigation of these gene expression programs has uncovered important roles in dendritic growth, the development of excitatory and inhibitory synapses, the composition of protein complexes at pre- and post-synaptic sites, and the production of neuropeptides that control neural circuit development. And defects in the activity-dependent gene program contribute to disorders of human cognition. Thus, study of this transcriptional response promises new insights into neuronal plasticity and disease.
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Parking information:
Team members will greet guests at the parking lot entrance and be a guide to the Sue Gross Auditorium.
See map below. Guests can enter and park at the Health Sciences Parking Structure, marked by the red “X”. The Sue Gross Auditorium is marked by the yellow star.
If you do not have a UCI parking permit, register for your free parking permit in advance at this link: https://apps.parking.uci.edu/parkbyplate/s/purchase.cfm?code=PSCLEC
For any questions, please contact Starr Ngo at sgngo@hs.uci.edu.