42nd Annual Jim McGinnis Memorial Lecture: "The Collaborative Cross"

Dr Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, Professor and Chair in the Department of Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine, is an Oliver Smithies Investigator at the UNC School of Medicine and a UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center member. Dr Pardo-Manuel de Villena is best known for creating the Collaborative Cross Project, hundreds of multi-parental recombinant inbred mouse lines specifically designed to overcome the limitations of existing mouse genetic resources to analyze phenotypes caused by combinatorial allele effects. The establishment of the CC enabled researchers to reproduce the complexity of the human genome to study human diseases with complex etiologies originating through interactions between allele combinations and the environment.

About the McGinnis lecture:
The annual McGinnis Memorial Lecture was established by the staff and students of the Departments of Microbiology and Immunology in 1979 to honor the memory of James William McGinnis, Jr., a beloved Duke doctoral candidate working in Bill Joklik's laboratory who died unexpectedly in a canoeing accident. Since its inception, the McGinnis lecture program has featured thirty-nine exemplary speakers, including five Nobel laureates, eleven Lasker Award recipients, ten recipients of the National Medal of Science, and thirty-four members of the National Academy of Sciences, including leading investigators in the areas of molecular biology, virology, microbial pathogenesis and physiology, genetics, immunology, vaccines, and RNA biology.