Roger Pocock
Roger Pocock Professor Brain Development Neuroplasticity and Stem Cells Laboratory Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology Monash University, Australia About the Speaker: Professor Roger Pocock is a NHMRC Senior Research Fellow at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. Roger leads the Brain Development, Neuroplasticity and Stem Cells Laboratory in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology. Roger grew up on the south coast of England where he entered the banking sector as a teenager. During his mid-twenties, Roger decided to completely change his career path and studied Genetics and Biochemistry at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth and at Washington State University in the USA. Roger trained as a doctoral student at the University of Oxford from 2000-2004, where he was first introduced to his favourite model organism-the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. During this period, Roger worked on the transcriptional control of embryonic development before moving into the neuroscience field. Upon completion of his doctorate, Roger commenced his postdoctoral work at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City. Here, he again used C. elegans, but now to study how the nervous system senses and responds to environmental stress. This work produced ground-breaking studies in the field of hypoxia (low oxygen), insights into which are now being used to design drugs to prevent brain defects in premature newborn babies. In 2010, Roger started his own research group at the University of Copenhagen. The focus of his research during the early phase of his laboratory was to delineate functions of microRNAs in neuronal development and function, in addition to the control of neuronal fate programming by transcription factors. The Pocock laboratory has already yielded important insights into the genetic control of such decisions. Roger's laboratory continues to decipher mechanisms that control brain development, function and determinants of brain-intestinal communication. In January 2015, Roger received a Biomedicine Discovery Fellowship and a veski Innovation Fellowship to relocate his laboratory from Denmark to the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at Monash University. In 2017, Roger was awarded a NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship for his work on brain-intestinal communication. Selected Recent Publications: 1. Moreira P, Papatheodorou P, Deng S, Gopal S, Handley A, Powell DR, Pocock R (2023) Nuclear factor Y is a pervasive regulator of neuronal gene expression. Cell Rep 42:113582. 2. Wang WY, Sherry T, Cheng XR, Fan Q, Cornell R, Liu J, Xiao ZC, Pocock R (2023) An intestinal sphingolipid confers intergenerational neuroprotection. Nat Cell Biol 25:1196-1207. 3. Cornell R, Cao W, Liu J, Pocock R (2022) Conditional Degradation of UNC-31/CAPS Enables Spatiotemporal Analysis of Neuropeptide Function. J Neurosci 42:8599-8607. 4. Handley A, Wu QL, Sherry T, Cornell R, Pocock R (2022) Diet-responsive transcriptional regulation of insulin in a single neuron controls systemic metabolism. PLoS Biol 20:e3001655. 5. Gopal S, Amran A, Elton A, Ng L, Pocock R (2021) A somatic proteoglycan controls Notch-directed germ cell fate. Nat Commun 12:6708.
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