The next Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series hosted by the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience will be February 13, 2020, at 7 p.m. with the program titled “The Human Cell Atlas Project – Mapping the Human Body Cell by Cell”. Gary Bader, Ph.D., Professor at The Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto, will be the speaker. This free lecture will be presented at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine.

The human body is made up of trillions of cells of thousands of different types. New technology has opened a new window of discovery on this cellular world. Dr. Bader will share The Human Cell Atlas Project, a large international scientific effort to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells – the fundamental units of life – as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. 

Gary Bader is a Professor at The Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto and an international leader in the field of Computational Biology, an interdisciplinary research area that combines biology and computer science.  Dr. Bader’s research team is trying to understand how cells within the healthy human body work and what goes wrong in diseases such as cancer, with the hope that this information can be used to design new treatments. This research, for instance, helped identify a histone methylation inhibitor as the first therapeutic drug candidate for pediatric ependymoma, a devastating childhood brain cancer.