MIT's Dane Wittrup to deliver Enabling Innovative Initiative lecture tomorrow

The Enabling Innovation Initiative (el2) will host a lecture on Friday, March 23 at 3 p.m. in 214 Light Hall. A reception with refreshments will immediately follow.

Dane Wittrup from MIT will present "Respecting Expertise: How Humility and a Decade of Effort Built the Best Antibody Discovery Platform"

Wittrup attended the University of New Mexico as an undergraduate, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachlor’s in Chemical Engineering in June, 1984. He went on to attend the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he worked with James Bailey on flow cytometry and segregated modeling of recombinant populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After obtaining his PhD in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Biology in 1988, Wittrup spent a brief time working at Amgen before becoming an assistant professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September of 1999, where he is now the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering, in addition to working with the Koch Institute as the Associate Director for Engineering.  In addition to work in his own laboratory at MIT, Wittrup is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for Adimab.

Vanderbilt's Enabling Innovation Initiative is a new program designed to encourage and support a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship to promote discovery here at Vanderbilt. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Technology Transfer & Commercialization and Basic Sciences.

For more information, contact Rob Carnahan (robert.carnahan@vanderbilt.edu) or Chuck Sanders (chuck.sanders@vanderbilt.edu).