Giles Distinguished Lecture Series: ‘How to Build a Dog in 2,392,236 Simple Steps’

Elaine Ostrander, chief investigator for the National Institutes of Health’s Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch, will give two talks March 30, “Happiness is a Warm Puppy and Its Complete Genome Sequence” at 9:30 a.m. in Bettersworth Auditorium and “How to Build a Dog in 2,392,236 Simple Steps” at 3:45 p.m. in the Old First-Year Classroom, College of Veterinary Medicine.

The lectures are free and open to the public.

“Happiness is a Warm Puppy” delves into dog cancer genetics as an informant on research of the same diseases in humans.“How to Build a Dog” focuses on the influence of humans on the shaping of dog breeds and why some are prone to specific diseases, including cancer. 

Interested in “all things dogs,” Elaine is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is an elected member to the National Academy of Sciences. In both 2019 and 2021, she received the NIH Director’s Award and was the 2020 National Human Genome Research Institute Mentor of the Year. Holding a Ph.D. from Oregon Health Sciences University, she did her postdoctoral training at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.

For more information on the March 30 morning lecture, contact Merrill Warkentin, James J. Rouse Endowed Professor of Information Systems, Department of Management and Information Systems, at m.warkentin@msstate.edu. For the March 30 afternoon lecture at CVM, contact Daniel Peterson, director, Institute of Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology, dp127@msstate.edu.