The Wellstone MD CRC Director, Dr. Emerson, is responsible for the overall administration and leadership of the Wellstone MD CRC. The Co-Director, Dr. Kunkel, works with Dr. Emerson to ensure its smooth operation and to foster collaborations, propagation of materials, and data sharing among the investigators, external research, clinical, patient and industry partners. Dr. Emerson leads the Wellstone MD CRC in conjunction with the Local Executive Committee (LEC), Center Advisory Committee (CAC), Education and Training Core Executive Committee (ETCEC), the Bioinformatics team, the Office of the Patient Communication and Liaison (OPCL), web development team, and NIH program staff.

The Director of the BBRI Senator Paul D. Wellstone MD CRC is Charles P. Emerson, Jr., Ph.D. Dr. Emerson is a Senior Scientist, and the Director of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute since 2003. He is an internationally recognized developmental biologist for his research on skeletal myogenesis. He has been the recipient of NIH Career Development and Merit Awards and two NIH training grants. Dr. Emerson will serve as the Wellstone MD CRC Director as well as the lead investigator in myoblast cell culture studies to understand the cellular pathology of FSHD in Project 3 and to establish a FSHD myoblast cell repository in Cell Core C.

Dr. Emerson can be reached at:

Charles P. Emerson, Jr., Ph.D.
Director and Senior Scientist
Boston Biomedical Research Institute
64 Grove Street
Watertown, MA 02472 USA
(617) 658-7721
(617) 972-1759 fax
emersonc@bbri.org

The Wellstone MD CRC Co-Director is Dr. Louis M. Kunkel, Ph.D. who is the Director of the Program in Genomics at Children's Hospital, Boston. He is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Pediatrics and of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is an internationally recognized geneticist with years of experience and scientific success in the understanding of the basis for muscular dystrophies. Over the past three decades, he has devoted his career to understanding the molecular basis of, and developing therapy for neuromuscular disorders. Dr. Kunkel is universally recognized for the identification of the gene and encoded protein, dystrophin, which is mutated in boys with Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophy, in 1986-1987. He has received 22 awards and honors for scientific leadership and achievement including memberships in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Gardner Foundation International Award in 1989, Silvio O. Conte Decade of Brain Award in 1991, the MDS's S. Mouchly Small Scientific Achievement Award 1999, and the William Allan Award for Distinguished Service in Human Genetics in 2004. In addition to serving as Co-Director, Dr. Kunkel is the principal investigator in Project 2: RNA / RNAi profiling studies for FSHD biomarker identification.

Dr. Kunkel can be reached at:

Louis Kunkel, Ph.D.
Enders 5
Children's Hospital
300 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
(617) 355-8200 or (617) 355-6729
(617) 730-0253 fax
kunkel@enders.tch.harvard.edu

Responsibilities of the Program Director and Co-Director

The Director and Co-Director will be responsible for:

• fulfilling the scientific objectives of projects outlined in this Wellstone MD CRC application;
• providing critical oversight of the scientific excellence of the four (4) component projects;
• ensuring and maintaining a unifying research theme of the Wellstone MD CRC;
• effective management of the Wellstone MD CRC funds;
• establishing the three (3) cores and providing access to cores for internal and external Wellstone MD CRC researchers working on FSHD, and the;
• leveraging synergistic interactions to maximize scientific impact of this Wellstone MD CRC.

Figure 1. Wellstone MD CRC Organizational Framework and Organizational Chart