The conference is in English.
The Sudhof lab major goal is to gain mechanistic insight into how synapses are formed and eliminated during development and throughout life. Towards that goal, Sudhof and his colleagues have identified major surface-signaling proteins that also are adhesion molecules and are key components of a sophisticated nanomachine organizing synapses. Functional disruption of these proteins causes a panoply of synaptic impairments, consistent with the notion that synapses are assembled via the concerted actions of multiple signaling pathways akin to a mosaic in which each individual stone piece contributes to the overall picture. Many of the Sudhof proteins identified are involved in neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, consistent with a central role for synapses in human diseases.
Prof. Thomas C. Südhof, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize, is a guest of the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en biologie (CIRB) research team, headed by Fekrije Selimi.
Thomas Südhof is a German-American biochemist known for his study of synaptic transmission. Currently, he is a professor in the School of Medicine in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, and by courtesy in Neurology, and in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Thomas Südhof, James Rothman and Randy Schekman are the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureates for their work on vesicle trafficking.
Südhof studied medicine at the RWTH Aachen University, Harvard University, and then the University of Göttingen. In Göttingen Südhof worked on his doctoral thesis, in which he described the structure and function of chromaffin cells, at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the lab of Victor P. Whittaker. In 1982, he received his MD in medical science (Dr. med.) from the University of Göttingen. Südhof moved to the United States in 1983, where he began postdoctoral training in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center (now the UT Southwestern Medical Center) in Dallas, Texas, under the supervision of Michael Stuart Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein. During his postdoctoral research fellowship, Südhof worked to describe the role of the LDL receptor in cholesterol metabolism, for which Brown and Goldstein were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985. Südhof finished his postdoctoral training in 1986 and was elected to be an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He then established his own laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center where he focused on the molecular and cellular neurosciences centered on synapses for over 20 years. In 2008, Südhof moved to Stanford University and is currently the Avram Goldstein Professor in the School of Medicine as well as a Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology, Psychiatry, and Neurology.
