User:Jeff Coller

Bio

I have a long standing fascination with the study of RNA that dates back more than 15 years. My interest stems from undergraduate work I conducted on group I introns in Dr. Britt-Marie Sjöberg’s lab at Stockholm University in Sweden. Following that experience, I was drawn to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school where I immersed myself in the rich culture of RNA research that occurs at that institution. My Ph.D. work was performed in the lab of Dr. Marv Wickens; I was attracted to Marv’s lab because I was fascinated by the observation that most early developmental decisions in the embryo do not occur as a consequence of gene transcription, rather, most are made by regulating the translational status of maternal mRNAs. Following completion of my graduate work, I continued to study the process of mRNA translation as a Post-doc in Dr. Roy Parker’s lab (University of Arizona, HHMI). During the course of our work, Roy and I realized that the active regulation of mRNA translation is not an event reserved solely for the embryo, rather, it most likely occurs in all cells and is ancient in origin. I recently left Roy’s lab as I was most fortunate to have the opportunity to start my own lab in an environment renowned for its RNA community, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Now, as a primary investigator in the Center for RNA Molecular Biology at CWRU, I continue to explore an intriguing aspect of gene expression that involves the active movement of mRNA in and out of translation.