Committee

Megan received her B.A. in Biochemistry from Brandeis University working with Dr. Susan Lowey and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Mark Lemmon. During her postdoctoral training with Dr. Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University, she discovered new mechanisms for the targeting and function of integral inner nuclear membrane proteins. Since founding her own group in 2009, Megan has continued to investigate the broad array of biological functions that are integrated at the nuclear envelope, from impacts on DNA repair to nuclear and cellular mechanics. Megan was named a Searle Scholar in 2011, is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award and is currently an Allen Distinguished Investigator.

Mark Lemmon, PhD, FRS is the Alfred Gilman Professor of Pharmacology, and Co-Director of Yale Cancer Biology Institute.  He returned to Yale as the David A. Sackler Professor of Pharmacology in 2015 after 19 years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. At Penn, he was the George W. Raiziss Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics as well as Chair of the department and an Investigator at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. Dr. Lemmon was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (the UK's national academy) in 2016, and has been honored with the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award of the Protein Society and the Stanley N. Cohen Biomedical Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania.  He is on the Editorial Advisory Boards of several journals, including Cell and Molecular Cell, and is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Biochemical Journal. Dr. Lemmon’s research focuses on understanding the signaling networks controlled by receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) growth factors that, when mutated, cause cancers and other diseases.  His laboratory combines biochemical, structural, biophysical, and cellular approaches to investigate how these networks function, and also collaborates with clinical groups to apply the mechanistic lessons learned to inhibitor choice and combating development of resistance to targeted therapies in the clinic.

Professor Townsend received his Ph.D. in 2002 in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University, under the advisement of Daniel Hartl. His Ph.D. was entitled "Population genetic variation in genome-wide gene expression: modeling, measurement, and analysis", and constituted the first population genetic analysis of genome-wide gene expression variation. After making use of the model budding yeast S. cerevisiae for his Ph.D. research, Dr. Townsend accepted an appointment as a Miller Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, where he worked to develop molecular tools, techniques, and analysis methodologies for functional genomics studies with the filamentous fungal model species Neurospora crassa, co-advised by Berkeley fungal evolutionary biologist John Taylor and molecular mycologist Louise Glass. In 2004, he accepted his first appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. In 2006 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In 2013 he began to work on statistical approaches to fit mathematical models of disease spread and emergence, and to work on the somatic evolution of cancer, and was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2017 he was named Elihu Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and in 2018 he was appointed Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2019 he was appointed a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, in recognition of the development of innovative approaches to population biology, including the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, disease evolution and transmission, and evolution of tumorigenesis; and research that has enabled curtailment of pathogen evolution, outbreak mitigation, and informed therapeutic approaches to cancer metastasis and evolution of therapeutic resistance in cancer. In 2021 he was selected as the Co-Chair-Elect of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research, and in 2022 he was appointed Co-Director of the Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics Program of the Yale Cancer Center.