Bio

John Isaac Murray did his graduate work in Genetics with David Botstein at Stanford University. He worked on several projects, including the genome-wide characterization of stress responsive and cell cycle regulated genes in human cells, and in defining gene expression signatures of the autoimmune disease Scleroderma. His work on stress responses identified highly distinct gene expression responses to different types of stress in a single cell type, and to the same stress in different cell types. To extend this type of expression analysis to an in vivo setting, he joined the laboratory of Robert Waterston in the University of Washington department of Genome Sciences. There, he developed automated microscopy based methods to allow the single-cell resolution measurement of gene expression in developing embryos of the nematode C. elegans, a major model organism. Applying these methods to define expression patterns at high resolution for a large collection of transcription factors identified novel mechanisms and important regulators of developmental fate specification, which Dr. Murray is now studying in his own laboratory. Since 2010 he has been Assistant Professor of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania and a core member of the Penn Genome Frontiers Institute.