Dr Wahls

Editor-in-Chief:  Dr Wayne P. Wahls

Dr. Wayne Wahls is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.  He studied biology (B.S.) and genetics and development (M.S.) at the University of Illinois, microbiology and immunology (Ph.D.) at the University of Illinois Chicago, and protein biochemistry as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.  Dr. Wahls has received awards for excellence in teaching and research, and he gratefully acknowledges support from the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation, the Leukemia Society of America, and the Human Frontier Science Program.

The Wahls’ laboratory has a productive, NIH-funded research program that uses a model organism, the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, to study broadly conserved pathways of fundamental importance to eukaryotic cells.  One project is focused upon meiotic chromosome dynamics, with emphasis upon molecular mechanisms that position homologous recombination events at hotspots along chromosomes.  A second project is focused upon signal transduction pathways of stress responses, with emphasis upon regulation by multifunctional transcription factors of the ATF/CREB family.