Gaudenz Danuser

Gaudenz Danuser received his diploma in Geodetic Engineering in 1993 and graduated in 1997 with a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Between 1997 and 1999 he was a Postdoc at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, where he worked in the Program for the Architectural Dynamics in Living Cells directed by Dr. Shinya Inoué developing image analysis methods for high resolution measurements of cytoskeleton dynamics. He returned to ETH Zurich in summer 1999, first as a Senior Researcher and then an Assistant Professor for Cell Biomechanics in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering. He founded the BioMicroMetrics Group whose mission was to develop quantitative light microscopy and biophysical models of cell dynamical processes to support research on cytoskeleton biology and biotechnological applications such as cell-based drug screening, sensing and biomaterial design. In August 2003 Gaudenz Danuser moved back to the U.S. to set up the Laboratory for Computational Cell Biology (LCCB) in the Center of Integrated Molecular Biosciences (CIMBio) at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. His new lab works on computational methods for quantitative, high resolution microscopy and multi-scale models to study the action of complex, multifunctional molecular machinery in cells. Currently, LCCB research focuses on the development of comprehensive biophysical theory of mechanical and chemical signal integration in cytomechanochemical systems, such as the mitotic spindle or the two molecular machineries underlying cell migration and receptor-mediated endocytosis, respectively.

Gaudenz Danuser is a member of IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, the Royal Microscopical Society, the Biophysical Society, and the American Society for Cell Biology. He is also a member of the Whitaker Institute of Bioengineering at the UCSD. His work has been recognized by several awards and honors, particularly his efforts in combining cell biology with engineering and computer science approaches. He is an Editorial Board Member of Biophysical Journal and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

His involvement in CDP since January 2006 has focused on development of hybrid stochastic and deterministic numerical models to identify fundamental rules in the design of molecular pathways so that random simultaneous and/or sequential activation of various pathway nodes lead to reproducible outputs at the level of the cell function. Within the CDP effort, his lab uses cell protrusion is a testbed to analyze such behaviour, for several reasons: First, the Danuser has developed high-resolution, high-throughput methods to characterize protrusion patterns and a large number of molecular tools to specifically perturb pathways. Also, the collaboration with the CDP will significantly expand these existing experimental possibilities. Second, if needed, further quantitative microscopy methods will be available to measure both cytoskeletal dynamics and the activation of key signals implicated in the pathways. Third, the cell protrusion machinery is probably the biochemically best characterized cell biological system, providing a good starting point for mathematical modelling efforts. Fourth, cell protrusion is the first major event in the development of cancer metastasis. There is strong evidence for a direct implication of EGF signalling in initiating protrusion, which goes hand-in-hand with the antagonism between the TNF and EGF signalling defining the core question of the CDP program.

CDP-related publications

Machacek M. and Danuser G. Morphodynamic profiling of protrusion phenotypes. Biophys. J. 90: 1439 – 1452. 2006.