Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, PhD, NIH Distinguished Investigator and chief, Cell Biology and Metabolism Program at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), will be the final speaker for the 2011 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Laureate Lecture Series, a year-long program highlighting some of the top biomedical researchers in their fields.

Her lecture, titled “Breakthroughs in Imaging Using Photoactivatable Fluorescent Protein Technology,” will take place at noon on Thursday, November 17, in Scaife Hall, Auditorium 6.

Since her earliest days as a graduate student in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins in the late 1970s, Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz has been fascinated by the dynamic nature of cells and the activity of the organelles within them. Starting with monoclonal antibody tags and electron microscopy, novel techniques at the time, she tracked and quantified proteins as they moved through intracellular compartments to the terminal lysosome. In doing so, she debunked popular notions of these lysosomal organelles being static, “dead-end” repositories of cellular by-products. Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz’s work laid the foundation for later studies using the inhibitor brefeldin A and the green fluorescent protein (GFP) to visibly track molecules for quantitative analysis and modeling of intracellular protein traffic and organelle biogenesis in living cells and embryos.

Today, projects in the Lippincott-Schwartz lab cover a vast range of cell biology topics, including protein transport and the cytoskeleton, organelle assembly and disassembly, and the generation of cell polarity. Time-resolved live-cell imaging approaches, such as fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP), are used to analyze the spatio-temporal behavior and binding interactions of molecules in cells. Most recently, Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz’s research has focused on the development and use of photoactivatable fluorescent proteins that “switch on” in response to ultraviolet light, enabling visualization of high-density molecule distributions at the nano level. She has also pioneered the use of super-resolution light microscopy utilizing pulse photoactivation of selected proteins.

Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz received her bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and her PhD in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Richard Klausner at NICHD, she established her own lab there and is now NIH Distinguished Investigator and chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program.

Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz has been well-recognized for her work and is the recipient of this year’s Keith R. Porter Lecture from the American Society of Cell Biology and the 2010 Pearse Prize from the Royal Microscopical Society. She is associate editor for Current Protocols in Cell Biology and Journal of Cell Science and serves on the editorial boards of Cell and Physiology. Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz is also a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.