Development, renewal and plasticity in oral and gastrointestinal epithelia

Please note: this is an in-person only event.

Title: Development, renewal and plasticity in oral and gastrointestinal epithelia

Speaker: Ophir Klein serves as the inaugural executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s and the David and Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children’s Health. He is also Adjunct Professor of Orofacial Sciences and Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he was previously the Larry L. Hillblom Distinguished Professor in Craniofacial Anomalies and the Charles J. Epstein Professor of Human Genetics.

Until 2022, he served as Director of the Institute for Human Genetics, Chief of the Division of Medical Genetics, Chair of the Division of Craniofacial Anomalies, and Director of the Program in Craniofacial Biology at UCSF. Dr. Klein was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in Spanish Literature. He subsequently attended Yale University School of Medicine, where he received a Ph.D. in Genetics and an M.D. He then completed residencies at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Pediatrics and at UCSF in Clinical Genetics. Dr. Klein has received several honors, including a New Innovator Award from the NIH and the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research.

Dr. Klein was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Klein’s research focuses on understanding how organs form in the embryo and how they regenerate in the adult, with a particular emphasis on the processes underlying craniofacial and dental development and renewal as well as understanding how stem cells in the intestinal epithelium enable renewal and regeneration.

Host: Professor Francesca Spagnoli, CGTRM