Attendee: Bruce Shapiro

Dr. Bruce A. Shapiro is a senior investigator with the Center for Cancer Research Nanobiology Program at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Frederick, Maryland. He has been associated with the National Institutes of Health since 1973. He received a B.S. from Brooklyn College with a major in mathematics and a minor in physics, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1978. He was also a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. At NIH he directs research on computational and experimental RNA structure prediction and analysis and in the emerging field of RNA nanobiology. During his association with the NIH, Dr. Shapiro has done extensive work in these areas leading to several novel RNA folding and analysis algorithms, computer systems, experimental techniques and discoveries in RNA biology. His interests include RNA nanobiology, nucleic acid structure prediction and analysis, the relationships between RNA structure and function, the use of high performance computer architectures to solve problems related to RNA computational and experimental biology and molecular modeling. He has published numerous papers and book chapters on these topics.

Most recently Dr. Shapiro has pioneered efforts in the emerging field of RNA nanobiology where his group has been developing a synergy between computational and experimental techniques, where computationally designed novel RNA based nanostructures have been shown to be able to self-assemble as predicted and have the potential for use in RNA-based therapeutics. Several of these designs have been experimentally verified and shown to be functional in cell cultures and mouse models.