April 23, 2025
3:00 PM to 4:15 PM ET
10 Center Drive
Bethesda, MD 20892
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If this applies to you, please inform the NIH event organizer to add your name and email to our VisitNIH Pre-Registration Portal.
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If you have any questions, please contact kathryn.demott@nih.gov. We are looking forward to your attendance!
The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) and the National Eye Institute (NEI) are pleased to announce that Claude Desplan, Ph.D., from New York University, will deliver the third Joram Piatigorsky Basic Science Lecture and Award.
A light reception will follow the lecture.
About the Joram Piatigorsky Basic Science Lecture and Award Series
Made possible by the generous philanthropic support of Lona and Joram Piatigorsky, this series brings attention to notable basic sciences contributions by eye and vision scientists to a diverse general scientific audience, such as experts in molecular biology, genetics, developmental biology, neuroscience, and computer science. With special consideration for basic eye and vision scientists who take risks exploring little-studied species and imaginative ideas, the Lecture and Award promotes and communicates basic discoveries in eye and vision research that result in far-reaching observations that may inform widespread areas of science—from the eye to the world as it were—rather than the other way around.
About Claude Desplan
Dr. Desplan was born in Algeria and trained at the École Normale Supérieure in St. Cloud, France. He received his D.Sc. at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) in Paris in 1983, working with M.S. Moukhtar and M. Thomasset on calcium regulation. In 1984, he joined Pat O’Farrell at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow, where he demonstrated that the homeodomain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA binding motif.
In 1987, he joined the faculty of Rockefeller University as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Assistant/Associate Investigator, pursuing structural studies of the homeodomain and the evolution of axis formation in Drosophila. In 1999, Dr. Desplan joined NYU where he investigates the generation of neural diversity using the Drosophila visual system. His team has described the molecular mechanisms that pattern the eye, and shown how stochastic decisions contribute to the diversification of photoreceptor. Another research focus is the development and function of the optic lobes where neuronal diversity is generated by spatio-temporal patterning of neural stem cells, a mechanism that also applies to cortical development in mammals. His laboratory uses ‘evo-devo’ approaches to understand the mechanisms by which sensory systems adapt to different ecological conditions, from flies to butterflies to ants.
Dr. Desplan serves on multiple scientific advisory boards and committees for funding agencies. He is an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the New York Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Accommodations
American Sign Language interpreting services are available upon request. Individuals who need interpreting services and/or other reasonable accommodations to participate in this event, should contact Kathryn DeMott at kathryn.demott@nih.gov or the NIH Interpreting Office directly, via email, at nih@ainterpreting.com. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance in order to ensure interpreter availability.