Alex Bishop, D.Phil., joined the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute in September of 2004 with major faculty responsibilities as a Principal Investigator in Molecular Oncogenesis and Assistant Professor in the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology. He received his doctoral degree from Oxford University and completed two post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University.

Dr. Bishop is a geneticist who studies the genes involved in genomic instability, a fundamental cause of cancer, by examining homologous recombination events. He obtained his doctoral degree from Oxford University under the supervision of Dr. Rhona Borts, studying meiotic recombination of repetitive elements in yeast. During his first post-doctoral appointment with Dr. Robert Schiestl at the Department of Cancer Cell Biology at Harvard School of Public Health, he was awarded an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship. There he characterized an in vivo murine system to examine carcinogen-induced homologous recombination events. With this system, he went on to investigate the genetic control of these events, using mouse models deficient for components of the cellular damage response pathway, such as ATM and p53. His second post-doctoral tenure was in the laboratory of Dr. Phil Leder, Chairman of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. There he developed genome-wide screens to examine carcinogen susceptibility and genomic instability/homologous recombination using RNAi knock-down technology in Drosophila tissue culture.

 

Analogous mouse tissue culture and whole animal model systems are being developed to allow the same functional readout to address future questions. For this work he has been awarded a Transition-to-Independent-Position (K-22) Research Development Grant from the NIEHS.