Rocky Hill, CT – Three Academy members will deliver this year’s keynote address at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at Quinnipiac University in Hamden.

Laura Grabel of Wesleyan University, Marc Lalande of the UConn Health Center and Haifan Lin of Yale University will highlight the accomplishments of the eight-year-old Connecticut Stem Cell Research Program, which began in 2005. Approximately $69 million in grants have been awarded to date to Connecticut stem cell researchers at Yale, UConn and Wesleyan.

Dr. Grabel is Wesleyan’s Lauren B. Dachs Chair of Science and Society. As Co-PI of the UConn Health Center’s Stem Cell Core grant, Dr. Grabel runs the outreach component of the program. Her work examines many aspects of embryonic stem cell differentiation, most recently the production of neural stem cells and neurons from mouse and human embryonic stem cells.

Marc Lalande is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology and Senior Associate Dean for Research Planning and Coordination in the School of Medicine at UConn. He is also Director of the UConn Stem Cell Institute and its Institute for Systems Genomics. His area of research expertise is molecular genetics and stem cell models of human neurodevelopmental disorders.

Haifan Lin established and directs the Yale Stem Cell Center and is also Professor of Cell Biology and of Genetics at Yale. His work is focused on the self-renewing mechanism of stem cells and his key contributions include the discovery of a novel class of non-coding small RNAs called PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), which was hailed by the Science Magazine as one of the Ten Scientific Breakthroughs of 2006.