Orion Weiner

Signal transduction networks enable cells to respond to the world around them. To uncover how these signaling networks generate proper responses, we need not only a parts list but also an understanding of how their constituent molecular components work together to process information. Dr. Weiner’s lab is focused developing methods for unraveling how complex biological systems function. His primary interest lies in understanding the signaling circuits that organize cell polarity.

As a graduate student with Henry Bourne and John Sedat at the University of California at San Francisco, Weiner helped delineate where gradient amplification occurs during neutrophil polarization. As a postdoc with Marc Kirschner and Lew Cantley at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Weiner discovered a Rac/PIP3/actin positive feedback loop that plays a central role in generating neutrophil polarity. He also discovered that the actin assembly machinery in neutrophils is a dynamic excitable medium.

Dr. Weiner joined the faculty at the University of California at San Francisco in 2005 where, in collaboration with the Voigt and Lim labs at UCSF, he developed an approach to spatially and temporally control signaling in mammalian signaling with light. This approach will enable a new generation of precision perturbative experiments that could revolutionize our understanding of biological systems.

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