Talila Volk is an associate professor in the field of Developmental Biology and the incumbent of the Sir Ernest B. Chain Professional Chair. Her major research interest is in tissue morphogenesis and organogenesis during embryonic development. She has been studying the function and activity of the STAR family member Held Out Wing (HOW) in the fruit fly Drosophila since 1999. She served as the chair for the Society of Developmental Biology in Israel (ISDB). Dr. Volk has gained her BSc from Tel‑Aviv University, and her MSc and PhD degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. Karen Artzt is an Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin where she directed a research laboratory for 20 years. There she was a member of the Section of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. Prior to that she was an associate Member of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Her main research interests include developmental genetics with an emphasis on cancer biology. In collaboration with Tom Ebersole she identified and cloned the mouse gene quaking that was one of the founding members of the STAR family. Dr. Artzt received her academic degrees from Cornell university; a BA from the Ithaca campus and a PhD from the Medical College School of Graduate Sciences in New York City. In 1972 she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pasteur Institute in Paris under the direction of the Nobel Prize winner, Francois Jacob.
