Major Research Areas
Career Opportunities
Available tenure track positions

Research in the Molecular Biology Program is directed at understanding how cell growth is regulated. This understanding is crucial to developing an appreciation of the fundamental principles of cellular metabolism and of how these metabolic processes can become corrupted, leading to oncogenesis.

Faculty in the Molecular Biology Program probe cellular processes in a number of different ways. Several investigators take a biochemical approach, reconstituting complex metabolic processes like DNA replication, meiotic recombination, transcriptional activation, and mRNA processing with purified proteins in order to investigate the function of the enzymes involved and how the processes are regulated. These investigations are conducted using experimental systems derived from bacteria, yeast, human, and animal viruses.

Genetic and molecular genetic approaches are used by several of the faculty to investigate local and long-distance transcriptional regulation in yeast and the fruit fly, the function of the yeast centromere, and to identify genes in the mouse that are crucial for embryonic development.

A strong core of faculty uses developmental systems derived from the mouse (including transgenic mouse models), chicken, and fruit fly to uncover genes and genetic programs involved in cell fate determination, cell-cell communication, and signal transduction during differentiation, and to understand the effect of cell cycle regulators on processess, such as commitment to differentiation.

The Molecular Biology Program is housed in the Rockefeller Research Laboratories building, providing a stimulating environment for faculty, students, and postdocs.

Kenneth J. Marians
Program Chairman and Dean, Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School
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