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Peng lecture slated for April 8
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Thomas
Dawson, a featured speaker at the second annual Peng Lecture Series
April 8 is a Procter & Gamble biologist sitting on the $6-billion
tip of a scientific research mountain.
“The Science of Hair: An Industrial and Academic Perspective” is a Peng
lectureship featuring Dawson, principal scientist in hair care in the
P&G beauty technology division, and Alexander Awgulewitsch,
associate professor in the rheumatology and immunology division of the
MUSC Department of Medicine. The lectures will be from 3 to 5 p.m. in
QF302A, a third floor classroom of the South Carolina College of
Pharmacy’s MUSC campus. The lecture is free and open to the public,
though the subject matter is targeted to health professionals and
students.
The program is sponsored in part by an education grant from Vincent
Peng, a 1966 graduate of the MUSC College of Pharmacy who later became
a dermatologist, graduating from the MUSC College of Medicine in 1970.
He and his wife Cecelia have established the Dr. Vincent and Cecelia
Peng Endowed Chair in Melanoma and Cutaneous Oncology, which supports
the Peng Lectureship in Dermatologic Therapy at the MUSC campus of the
South Carolina College of Pharmacy. Head & Shoulders, a P&G
flagship product that leads the $6 billion anti-dandruff shampoo
market, took 10 years to develop before it hit the shelves in 1961.
Since the late 1990s, the company has looked to Dawson and his
colleagues to develop genetic tools to identify how microflora in the
scalp cause flaking. They discovered that dandruff is caused by
Malassezia globosa and M. restricta and subsequently identified LIP1,
the gene M. globosa uses to break down scalp oils. P&G has since
patented 12 genes contained in the M. globosa genome. Dawson’s lecture
on “Dandruff and Seborrheic Dermatitis: Are Flakes Bugging You or are
Bugs Flaking You?” is the first hour, followed by Awgulewitsch’s
lecture on “Systemic Implications of Defining Hox-Regulatory Pathways
in Hair Follicle Differentiation.”
There will be a Q-and-A after each lecture with a reception immediately
following in the Anderson House next door to the college.
A renowned scientist with an extensive background in Hox gene research
including specific study of the roles of selected Hox genes in skin and
hair follicle development, Awgulewitsch is the director of the MUSC
Transgenic Mouse Core Facility. He is currently the primary
investigator of an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to
define the molecular mechanisms underlying the pathological
developments in follicular and epidermal keratinocytes in transgenic
mice overexpressing Hoxc13.
The first Peng Lectureship was held Oct. 17 at MUSC. Speakers at the
Peng Symposium on Wound Healing included Thomas A. Mustoe, MD, Chief of
Plastic Surgery at Northwestern University; John H. Samies, MD, Medical
Director at Regional Medical Center, Orangeburg; William A. Marston,
MD, Division of Vascular Surgery at the University of North Carolina;
and Xuejun Wen, MD, PhD, Clemson-MUSC Bioengineering Program.
For more information, contact Marianne Rogers at 792-3111 or at rogersmr@sccp.sc.edu.
Online March 19, 2010
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