Prof. Peggy Farnham University of California in Davis, USA

Dr. Farnham obtained her PhD from Yale University in 1982, which is when she began working on transcriptional regulation. This topic was also the focus on Dr. Farnham's postdoctoral work at Stanford University (1982-1986) and became the cornerstone of her lab research when she joined the faculty at the McArdle... read moreLaboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1987. Major scientific contributions that came from Dr. Farnham's research at the University of Wisconsin include the identification of the E2F and Myc families of transcription factors as key mediators of the G1/S-phase transition of the mammalian cell cycle and the development of in-vivo DNA-protein assays to study transcription factor binding to promoter regions using living cells. Over the last two decades, the questions addressed in her lab have evolved from a detailed analysis of the transcriptional regulation of particular genes to a desire to investigate transcriptional regulation using a more global approach. Therefore, in 2004, Dr. Farnham relocated her laboratory to the University of California-Davis where she was the Associate Director of the Genome Center. In 2011, Dr. Farnham moved to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she is the William M. Keck Professor of Biochemistry and the Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs. Dr. Farnham is an international leader in the study of chromatin regulation and its control of transcription factor binding and function. She is a member of an international consortia of genomic scientists working on the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA elements) Project and a member of an NIH Roadmap Reference Epigenome Mapping Center. Based on her contributions to biomedical research, she was elected as a fellow of AAAS in 2010 and in 2012 she received the ASBMB Herbert A Sober Award, which recognizes outstanding biochemical and molecular biological research with particular emphasis on the development of methods and techniques to aid in research.