Ashley Dunn on Postdoctoral Research with Joe Sambrook
  Ashley Dunn     Biography    
Recorded: 15 Jan 2003

I was at the University of Birmingham in England. And so it was a quick trip across the Atlantic Ocean to reacquaint myself with Cold Spring Harbor. And I moved within a matter of months from the cell biology group that I’d gone along to, to work with Joe Sambrook who had invited me to spend time in James Lab [at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory].

And he really persuaded me that if I wanted to spend time in science and being mindful of the dawning of molecular biology I needed to be where the molecular biology action was and not where the cell biology action was. That was wonderful advice and I took it. And so I spent three years working with Joe as a postdoc.

Ashley Dunn is currently a Senior Consulting Scientist and member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Cryptome Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Australian biotech company. He also serves on Australia’s Gene Technology Advisory Committee. He is the former Head of Molecular Biology in the Melbourne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.

He came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1976 to work with Joe Sambrook as a postdoctoral fellow and eventually became a junior faculty member.

His research has been concentrated on mammalian growth factors and the regulators responsible for the production of white blood cells in mice and men. He co-invented a mammalian blood cell regulator (GM-CSF), and his lab was the one of the first to establish gene targeting in the development of human diseases such as cancer.