Prof. Denise Montell University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Dr. Denise Montell earned her B.S. degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the University of California, San Diego and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Stanford University. As an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution she developed a new model for studying cell motility in vivo using... read morea powerful combination of cell biology and molecular genetic approaches. In 1990 she attained an independent junior faculty position at the Carnegie and in 1992 became an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, rising to the rank of Full Professor in 2002. At the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine she served as Director of the Graduate Program in Biological Chemistry for 10 years and was the founding director of the Center for Cell Dynamics. Professor Montell joined the faculty of MCDB at UCSB in 2012. She has served on the Advisory Councils of the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, the American Society for Cell Biology, and the Gordon Research Conferences. She served as the 2020 President of the Genetics Society of America and serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute. She is an elected Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. The general theme of her lab is The general theme is the lab is to identify under-appreciated cell behaviors and tease apart the underlying molecular mechanisms as well as the physiological significance.