Gaudenz Danuser

Gaudenz Danuser is the inaugural chairman of the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics au UT Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) in Dallas. He also holds the Patrick E. Haggerty Distinguished Chair in Basic Biomedical Science and is a Scholar of the Cancer Prevention Institute of Texas (CPRIT). Before moving to UTSW, Danuser directed research laboratories at ETH Zurich (2002 – 2003), at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (2003 – 2009), and at Harvard Medical School (2009 – 2014).

Trained as an engineer (geodetic and electrical engineering/computer science), he has focused his research over the past 15 years on the question of how chemical and mechanical signals integrate into the regulation of cytoskeleton dynamics and intracellular membrane trafficking. Currently, his lab studies the implications of cell shape regulation in migration and survival of the metastatic cell, including the roles mechanical cues play in conferring what the lab calls ‘mechanical drug resistance’ and ‘mechano-metabolism’. To address these questions his lab develops innovative quantitative imaging methods to experimentally probe these processes and uses mathematical modeling to compile the data in mechanistic systems analyses.