Montana State professor to speak on neurogenesis

Dr. Frances Lefcort, associate professor of cell biology and neuroscience at Montana State University and a faculty member for the first-year medical school program there, will give this year’s WWAMI Science in Medicine Lecture.

Each year one of the Science in Medicine lectures, part of the series sponsored by the School of Medicine’s Office of Research and Graduate Education, is presented by a faculty member from one of the universities where first-year classes are taught as part of the regional medical education program in Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho, as well as Washington.

Lefcort will speak on “The Role of Neurotrophin-3 in Sensory Neurogenesis in the Dorsal Root Ganglia” at noon on Thursday, Dec. 7, in room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.

Her research focuses on the development of nerves feeding into the spinal cord that control signals from areas including skin, muscle and viscera. The signals conveyed include senses such as temperature, touch and pain. The growth of these neurons is determined, in part, by different members of the neurotrophin family of growth factors.

Using techniques in molecular and cell biology, her lab is working to determine the specific functions of several neurotropin receptors during the growth of these sensory nerves.

Lefcort, who has an affiliate appointment in the UW Department of Biological Structure, joined the faculty at Montana State University in 1994. A graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, she earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and then spent the next six years at the University of California, San Francisco, as a postdoctoral fellow and associate in the Department of Physiology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.