Robb Krumlauf
Stowers Institute for Medical Research
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Primary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology Secondary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2016)
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Biosketch
Robb Krumlauf is a developmental biologist known for demonstrating how the Hox family of transcription factors controls patterning of the hindbrain, head and body plan in development, disease and evolution. His seminal work discovered colinearity, whereby mammalian Hox homeobox genes are clustered next to one another and the order of genes on the chromosome matches the order of their expression and function in the embryo. Krumlauf was born in Ohio and grew up on New York. He received a degree in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1970 and a PhD in developmental biology from The Ohio State University in 1979. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research and the Fox Chase Cancer Center. In 1985 he joined the faculty of the National Institute for Medical Research UK (now Francis Crick Institute). In 2000 he became the founding Scientific Director of the Stowers Institute and holds faculty appointments at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Medical Science (UK), and served as Editor-in-Chief of Developmental Biology and President of the Society for Developmental Biology.
Research Interests
Our research is aimed at understanding the regulatory information and molecular mechanisms which control patterning of the basic vertebrate body plan. We focus on head development and Hox genes as model systems to understand patterning mechanisms and regulatory networks in hindbrain segmentation and craniofacial development. Hox genes play critical roles in regulating regional diversity in many tissues. Hence, our goal has been to dissect the regulatory cascades which govern Hox expression and function in the head and CNS, to build a basis for comparing and contrasting the Hox-dependent regulatory pathways that pattern diverse elements of the vertebrate body plan in development, disease and evolution.
