Stephen Michnick
University of Toronto
Stephen Michnick received his B. Sc. and Ph. D. from the University of Toronto with Jeremy P. Carver and did postdoctoral training at the Department of Chemistry, Harvard University with Profs. Stuart Schreiber and Martin Karplus. He is presently Professor of Biochemistry at Université de Montréal. A fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry of the UK since 2007, he is also the holder of a Canada Research Chair in Integrative Genomics since 2001. He has developed experimental and conceptual tools to study the dynamics of biochemical networks on a genome-wide scale. He has most recently completed the first large-scale analysis of protein-protein interaction in living cells of the model organism S. cerevisiae providing a topological map of the protein interaction network that defines the fundamental architecture of key cellular process possessed by all organisms including humans and related to multiple diseases[1]. He has also developed an approach to link chemical or other perturbations of cells to study protein network dynamics and applied this approach to predict known and unforeseen actions of drugs, including identifying 4 potential anti-cancer agents[2]. Dr. Michnick has also made other contributions including studies of the molecular and structural basis for actions of the immunosupressent drug FK506[3] and elucidation of a general mechanism for cytokine hormone receptor regulation[4] and the molecular bases of two processes that explain a key link between normal cellular differentiation and pathological states including cancers and diabetes[5]. Dr. Michnick has received several prestigious scholarships, including Burroughs-Wellcome New Investigator and Medical Research Council of Canada Scientist Awards. He is an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program in Molecular Evolution.