About

I did my undergraduate degree at Dalhousie, and my PhD at the University of Alberta in Genetics on an NSRC 1967 Scholarship. I then did post doctoral work at Harvard with Jack Szostak, first on an AHFMR fellowship, and then after the lab’s move to Mass General on a Harvard Fellowship. In 1985 I moved to Dave Thomas’ group at the NRC Biotechnology Research Institute, initially in space rented at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and then at the new building on Royalmount Ave. While in Dave’s group, with the help of some amazing colleagues, we were able to provide a number of key insights into the signaling pathway that controlled mating in the yeast S. cerevisiae. We identified the genes for the beta and gamma subunits of the heterotrimeric G protein that coupled the pheromone receptor proteins to downstream components, we found Ste20, the initial member of the PAK family of kinases, and we showed how the G protein uses physical linkage to activate the downstream kinase cascade. More recently we have switched our primary focus to the genomics of the pathogenic fungi C. albicans, which forms the majority of the effort in our new labs in the Genome Center at Concordia. Our synthetic biology work focuses on manipulating protein modules to modulate signalling pathways in fungi. We have built artificial adapter proteins that link kinases to membranes and activate them, and we have investigated several examples of transcriptional rewiring that show the same regulator controlling different processes in related ascomycetes.