Laboratory Members of Stress Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation

John Kyriakis, Ph.D.

Dr. Kyriakis received his A.B. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Boston University.  He did postdoctoral work in the Diabetes Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.  He then continued at the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Research Unit/Harvard Medical School for ten years as an independent faculty member.  He has made several contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms by which growth and stress stimuli trigger changes in cell function.  He is currently an Investigator with the MCRI, and Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.  He is director of the MCRI Laboratory of Stress Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation.  He is an Associate Editor of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, and serves on the Editorial Board of The American Journal of Physiology (Cell Physiology).

John Kyriakis

Sandro Goruppi, Ph.D.

Sandro Goruppi is a Research Associate at MCRI. After receiving his PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Trieste, Italy, he worked as a postdoctoral Fellow at ICGEB (International Center for Genetic Engeneering and Biotechnologies) and at LNCIB (National Laboratory Consortium Inter University for Biotechnologies) in Trieste, Italy. During this period he contributed to the identification of a novel growth factor, Gas6, and in the characterization of its biological activities, which are mediated by receptors of Axl tyrosine kinase family. In 1999 Dr. Goruppi was appointed as postdoctoral fellow in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Dr. John Kyriakis' laboratory.

Dr. Goruppi's ongoing work focuses on the identification and characterization of genes required for the propagation of diabetic nephropathy. Diabetic nephropathy is manifested by an excess of extracellular matrix deposition and hypertrophy of a specific smooth muscle-like cell type in the glomerulus, the mesangial cell. In addition to glucose, vasoactive peptides, such as endothelin and angiotensin, are elevated in diabetic kidney and can trigger mesangial cell hypertrophy. The current focus of Dr. Goruppi's work is the characterization of a novel gene, p8, that was isolated in a microarray-based transcriptional profiling and that was demonstrated to be a key regulator of Endothelin-induced hypertrophic response in mesangial cells.

 Sandro Goruppi

Xiufeng Song, Ph.D.

Xiufeng received her B.S. in Biology from Xinjiang University, China, and her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, studying the origin, migration and admixture of Chinese Population and Genetic structure of isolates in the laboratory of Dr. Li Jin. She then completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in at the Dept. of Pharmacology, Vanderbilt University studying the in vivo role of Arrestin1 in rod photoreceptors, as well as the characterization of the molecular interactions between arrestin and MAPKs.  In January 2010, Dr. Song was appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. John Kyriakis’s laboratory at MCRI. Her work will be focused on the investigation of the role of GCK in basic host-defense, atherosclerosis and obesity-induced inflammation. Her research goal is to elucidate the molecular pathways that lead to the activation of Mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs), as well as their biological functions.

Xiufeng Song