State-of-the-Art Plenary Lecture (GS)

George Sen, PhD, University of California, San Diego

Title: Regulators of Epidermal Growth, Differentiation, and Inflammation

Dr. George Sen is the inaugural Chief of the Division of Epithelial Biology and Professor in the Departments of Dermatology and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Sen received his PhD from Stanford University working on the RNA interference pathway. For his postdoctoral training, he joined the laboratory of Professor Paul Khavari at Stanford University where he studied the epigenetic and transcription factor control of epidermal stem cell growth and differentiation. In 2011, Dr. Sen joined the Departments of Dermatology and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego as tenure track faculty. His lab is interested in the mechanisms that govern epidermal stem cell fate decisions including its self-renewal and differentiation. He is also interested in how perturbations in epidermal growth and differentiation leads to skin diseases such as squamous cell carcinomas as well as inflammatory disorders such as psoriasis. His lab is interested in both transcriptional (epigenetic, RNA Pol II pausing/elongation, transcription factors) and post-transcriptional (RNA binding proteins) regulation of epidermal cell fate decisions.