Alexander Stark - Decoding transcriptional regulation

CV

Alexander Stark studied Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For his PhD, he worked on structural bioinformatics and microRNA target prediction at the EMBL in Heidelberg and obtained his PhD in 2004. Afterwards, he moved to Cambridge, MA for a postdoctoral stay at the Broad Institute and CSAIL, MIT. There he focused on comparative and regulatory genomics in Drosophila. Since 2008, Alexander Stark is an independent group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna.

Research

His group combines genome-wide experiments and bioinformatics to understand the sequence basis of gene regulation: “The regulation of gene expression in response to developmental or environmental stimuli is a crucial mechanism in all organisms. We are fascinated by the question how transcription is regulated at the level of the two key types of regulatory genomic elements — enhancers and core-promoters — and the transcription factor and cofactor proteins that mediate transcription activation. We follow an interdisciplinary approach, using genome-wide functional assays, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and mass-spectrometry. We develop and employ highly-controllable reporter assays that provide a reliable functional readout for each of the questions we ask, while circumventing the many confounding issues that exist in complex gene regulatory systems in vivo. Our goal is to understand transcription and — ultimately — how transcriptional networks define cellular and developmental programs.”

source: lab page