Saint-Jeannet Lab
Professor & Vice Chair for Research
Molecular Pathobiology
345 East 24th Street, room 1005 Schwartz
New York, NY 10010
E-mail: jsj4@nyu.edu
Biography
Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet obtained a PhD in Developmental Neurobiology from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, where he worked with Dr. Anne-Marie Duprat on the mechanisms underlying neural induction in the salamander Pleurodeles waltlii. He subsequently trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Jean Paul Thiery at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, studying cadherin-mediated cell-cell adhesion in development. Jean-Pierre performed a second postdoc with Dr. Igor B. Dawid at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda studying the role of canonical Wnt signaling pathway in cell fate specification. In 1998, Jean-Pierre was recruited in Department of Animal Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, and in 2012, he joined the Department of Basic Science and Craniofacial Biology at New York University College of Dentistry, where he is a Professor and Vice Chair for Research.
His research explores the cellular and molecular mechanisms regulating neural crest and cranial placode progenitors formation in normal and pathological situations, using the frog Xenopus laevis as a model system. Current work investigates how the balance between retinoic acid production and degradation contributes to the delineation of sharp boundaries of gene expression to impart cranial placode fate. Another line of research explores the role of components of the spliceosome in neural crest and craniofacial development, as several human craniofacial disorders have been linked to mutations in genes encoding proteins involved in pre-mRNA processing. Dr. Saint-Jeannet has served on numerous NIH and NSF study sections. He was the editor of a book "Neural Crest Induction and Differentiation" and the guest editor of a recent special issue of genesis "Celebrating 150 Years of Neural Crest Research."