Ruth Lehmann, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor and chair of the Department of Cell Biology at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, will deliver a Flexner Discovery Lecture on March 21.
Lehmann’s talk, “Mitochondria: Germline Inheritance and Selection,” will begin at 4 p.m. in Light Hall, Room 208.
Lehmann’s research focuses on reproductive biology and germ cells, the cells that mature into egg and sperm and are the only cells in the body with the potential to naturally generate a completely new organism. Her lab has made important discoveries in understanding how germ cells are specified in the early embryo and how they maintain the potential for totipotency while differentiating into egg and sperm in the adult.
She directs the Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine at NYU’s Langone Medical Center. She received her Ph.D. with Nobel Laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Plank Institute in Tübingen, Germany. After postdoctoral training at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, United Kingdom, she joined the Whitehead Institute and the faculty of MIT, before being recruited to the Skirball Institute in 1996.
Lehmann is a member of the American Academy of Arts Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
