Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series: Roeland Nusse, PhD
Dean's Distinguished Lecture Series
April 14, 2026
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
A New View on the Regulation of the Cell Cycle by Growth Factors
Roeland Nusse, PhD
Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research
Reception:
3:00–4:30 p.m.
CMWT Faculty Alumni Lounge
About the Speaker:
Dr. Nusse’s research focuses on the growth, development, and integrity of animal tissues, with particular emphasis on how stem cells maintain a balance between self‑renewal and differentiation. His laboratory studies multiple organs to uncover shared biological principles and extends this work to cancer and tissue repair.
A central theme of his research is Wnt signaling, a pathway shown to be essential for stem cell regulation across tissues. Dr. Nusse’s work investigates how these signals function in normal physiology as well as during hormonal changes, injury, and programmed tissue degeneration, using both in vivo models and cell culture systems.
Born in Amsterdam, Dr. Nusse earned his PhD from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the University of Amsterdam and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1990, where he served as Chair of the Department of Developmental Biology from 1999 to 2020. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1990.
His honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences, fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, membership in the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and the Canada Gairdner International Award for pioneering work on the Wnt signaling pathway.
Date posted
Apr 7, 2025
Date updated
Mar 2, 2026