Bio
Prof. Dr. George A. Calin received both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Carol Davila University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. After working in cytogenetics as an undergraduate student with Dragos Stefanescu in Bucharest, Calin completed cancer genomics training in Massimo Negrini’s laboratory at the University of Ferrara, Italy, and in 2000, he became a postdoctoral fellow in Carlo Croce’s laboratory at Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In June 2007, Calin joined MD Anderson as an associate professor in the Experimental Therapeutics department and was promoted to Professor with tenure in 2013. He explores new RNA therapeutic options for cancer patients and studies the roles of microRNAs and other non-coding RNAs in cancer initiation and progression, as well as the mechanisms of cancer predisposition.

Talk
The Emerging Roles of circSMARCA5 in Glioblastoma

Bio
Dr. Davide Barbagallo is a tenure -track Assistant Professor at University of Catania, Italy. Davide did his PhD studies in the lab of Professor Michele Purrello, University of Catania, working on the involvement of apoptotic machinery in the etiology of diabetes mellitus. Following this, in 2009, he started his Postdoc activity in the same lab where he focused on the study of non-coding RNA, especially microRNAs, and their involvement in diabetes mellitus and cancer. In 2010, his PhD thesis was awarded as the best in the field of complex biological systems from the Gioenian Academy. In 2017, he was awarded the Umberto Veronesi Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship and he joined Professor Jørgen Kjems’ non-coding RNA lab, University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he spent 6 months to improve his knowledge on circular RNAs (circRNAs), another class of (mostly) non-coding RNAs, recently discovered as critical regulators of gene expression. During his stay at the non-coding RNA lab, under the tutorship of Dr. Thomas Birkballe Hansen, Davide cloned the sequence of circSMARCA5 into an expression vector and showed the tumor-suppressive function and mechanism of action of this circRNA in glioblastoma multiforme. In 2018, Davide returned to the University of Catania, to the Department of Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences, where he has continued his work on circRNAs