LeeBardwell

Lee Bardwell is an American biologist specializing in signal transduction, cell biology and systems biology. He is currently a professor in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology in the UCI School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed research articles and reviews.^[1]^[2]

Education and academic appointments

Bardwell graduated with high honors in Biology and Mathematics/Economics from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1984. He received his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Stanford University in 1992, where he studied DNA repair in the laboratory of Errol C. Friedberg. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he studied with Jeremy W. Thorner in the field of yeast genetics and molecular biology. He started his laboratory at the University of California, Irvine in 1998. He was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in 2004, and became a full Professor in 2009.

After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1984, Bardwell worked for three years as a technician in the laboratory of Ruth Sager at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. Here he participated in identifying the gene for the chemokine CXCL1. He also participated in studies on the genome instability of cancer cells.

While studying at Stanford University, Bardwell worked on the nucleotide excision DNA repair pathway in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This work included characterizing a complex between the yeast orthologs of human ERCC1 and ERCC4, and investigating interconnections between nucleotide excision repair proteins and the basal transcription factor TFIIH.

Since then, Bardwell's research has focused on cell signaling and signal transduction, particularly on mitogen-activated protein kinases, MAPK kinases, MAPK phosphatases, and scaffold proteins. He has focused on how short linear motifs contribute to the organization and function of signaling cascades. He has also worked on the systems biology of signaling and signaling specificity.