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About the author
Dr. Simon Labbé is a Professor of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada. He received his bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from the Université Laval (Québec) in 1987. He undertook graduate studies at Laval Université and received his Master (1989) and Ph.D. (1995) in Microbiology and Molecular-cellular biology, respectively. Dr. Labbé continued his training as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Dennis J. Thiele at the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. He was supported by Fellowship awards, including the prestigious Centennial Fellowship from the Medical Research Council of Canada. Over the past sixteen years he has been at the Université de Sherbrooke where he has established his own laboratory. As an independent investigator, he has received the New Investigator Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Junior II and Senior Investigator Awards from the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. His research group has developed a productive yeast model (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) for investigating copper and iron metabolism at the molecular level. Because S. pombe provides a genetically tractable model that permits the drawing of parallels with other eukaryotic living systems, especially filamentous yeasts, Dr. Labbé’s research has contributed to the identification of molecular mechanisms that regulate copper and iron transport, as well as uncovering different strategies that yeasts have acquired to take up copper and iron from their environment and/or hosts.
Global Medical Discovery featured article: An antisense RNA-mediated mechanism eliminates a meiosis-specific copper -regulated transcript in mitotic cells