Professor
University of Alberta
University of Alberta
Dr. MacDonald has been studying pancreatic islets for nearly 25 years. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2003, where he studied the role for a potassium ion channel in the process of insulin secretion. Following this, Dr. MacDonald was a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University in Sweden, and then at the University of Oxford. In this time, Dr. MacDonald examined biophysical processes of membrane fusion and pancreatic hormone release. In 2006 Dr. MacDonald was recruited back to Canada and established his laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology and the Alberta Diabetes Institute at the University of Alberta. He has continued to study pancreatic islet biology and diabetes, most notably through the implementation of pancreas ‘patch-seq’ to connect biophysical properties of cells with gene expression and the study of signal transduction pathways that control cellular excitability (www.bcell.org). Dr. MacDonald established and Directs the Alberta Diabetes Institute IsletCore, a biobanking program that is now the largest of its kind in the world, providing human pancreas tissue in support of research by ~150 groups worldwide and co-founded the Canadian Islet Resaerch and Training Network (www.islets.ca) to support the pancreatic islet research community. Dr. MacDonald currently holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair and was a member of the inaugural cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Saturday, October 28, 2023
11:00 – 12:00 EST