isbscience.org/bio/timothy-galitski/
Timothy Galitski earned his PhD in the University of Utah’s Department of Biology where he identified mechanisms of chromosome rearrangement and studied the origin of genetic variation. His research earned him the 1996 James W. Prahl Memorial Award for the Outstanding Graduate Student at the University of Utah Medical Center. With a fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, Dr. Galitski went on to a postdoctoral position at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he combined functional genomics, genetics, and computational methods to reveal global patterns of gene expression specifying cell type and developmental potential in yeast. For this continuing work, Dr. Galitski was awarded the prestigious 2001 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences.
- Information-theory and genetic-network analysis: Applied information theory (Drees et al. 2005) and developed new information-theoretic approaches (Carter et al. 2009; Carter et al. 2010) to optimize the extraction of biological information from genetic networks.
- Microfluidics technology: Developed microfluidics technology enabling fully automated high-throughput dynamic perturbation and observation of live single-cells; applied this technology to study the kinetic genetics of MAP-kinase pathway signaling (Taylor et al. 2009).
- Computational phenotype prediction: Developed and demonstrated network modeling methods producing machine-generated predictions of gene-expression patterns and phenotypes for combinatorial genetic perturbations (Carter et al. 2007).
- RNA, gene regulation, and signaling: Identified an anti-sense RNA exhibiting mutually exclusive expression with its cognate RNA encoding a developmental regulator (Hongay et al. 2006), and demonstrated control of signaling in a MAP-kinase pathway through protein-RNA interaction (Prinz et al. 2007).
- Modular network organization: With the availability of genome-scale protein-protein interaction data sets, we were the first to show that this network has modular structure/function organization (Rives and Galitski 2003). We then applied this principle to extract biological insights (Prinz et al. 2004; Reiss et al. 2005).
- Ploidy-dependent gene expression and cell biology: As a postdoctoral fellow, used then-new microarray technology to demonstrate gene-expression patterns, and corresponding cell properties, that depend on the number of chromosome sets (Galitski et al. 1999).
- “Directed Mutation” controversy:As a graduate student, authored a pair of papers (Galitski and Roth 1995; Galitski and Roth 1996) that resolved an acrimonious dispute among geneticists about the origins of mutants and the interpretation of classical genetic experiments.
Microbiology
Genetics of Systems Biology
PhD, Biology
University of Utah, 1996