Please note due to travel restrictions, our Distinguished Public Lecture has been postponed. We will reschedule and announce the new date when it is available.

Do fruit flies have trouble sleeping? And can they help us learn about our own sleep and wakefulness? Find out from Nobel Laureate Dr. Michael Rosbash, Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Biology at Brandeis University, who will give his talk "Circadian Rhythms, Sleep and Flies: Past, Present and Future" as part of the IGB Distinguished Public Lecture series on April 7th, starting at 4:00pm at Alice Campbell Alumni Center.

Dr. Rosbash was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris and then obtained his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. After spending three years at the University of Edinburgh in United Kingdom, he began work in 1974 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. With his colleagues he studied fruit flies to research how cells maintain an internal clock that helps adapt a biological rhythm to the different phases of day and night. In 1984 they managed to identify a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates during the night but is degraded during the day. They also identified additional proteins that form part of a self-regulating biological clockwork in the fruit fly's cells. The same principles have been shown to apply to other animals and plants. Rosbash continues to research mRNA processing and the genetic mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms.

A reception will follow the talk.

IGB Distinguished Public Lecture
April 7, 4:00pm
Alice Campbell Alumni Center
601 S. Lincoln Avenue, Urbana, IL

"Circadian Rhythms, Sleep and Flies: Past, Present and Future"

Michael Rosbash, PhD
Nobel Laureate
Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience, Professor of Biology
Brandeis University