Dr. Jay L. Vivian was born January 30, 1971 in Dixon IL. He received his undergraduate training at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his B.S. degree in Biology-Honors with a minor in Chemistry in 1993. In 1999, Dr. Vivian completed his Ph.D. studies in Genes and Development at the University of Texas-Houston under the guidance of Dr. William Klein in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
From 1999 to 2004, Dr. Vivian received postdoctoral training in Dr. Terry Magnuson’s laboratory at Case Western Reserve University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His postdoctoral training was supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. In 2004, Dr. Vivian was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and a member of the Institute for Maternal-Fetal Biology and the Kansas Masonic Cancer Research Institute.
Dr. Vivian’s research interests have focused using the mouse as a genetic system to understand processes of embryonic development, through expansion of the technologies available to alter the mouse genome. He began his graduate research career studying embryonic muscle development in the mouse, a classic model of cellular differentiation. His work included the generation and analysis of a novel hypomorphic mutant allele of the myogenin locus to further study the function of this critical transcription factor in muscle development. Dr. Vivian continued his interests in mouse developmental genetics as a postdoctoral fellow. His postdoctoral work involved the development of novel strategies of generating mutations in mouse embryonic stem cells using chemical mutagens such as ENU.
Dr. Vivian initially focused his work on the development of mutations at the Smad2 locus, uncovering previously undescribed functions for Smad2 in embryonic development. These efforts highlight the power in the genetic analysis of allelic series generated by combining high-throughput mutation detection techniques with chemical mutagenesis in cell culture. Dr. Vivian continues his research focus in developmental genetics, studying signaling events in embryonic vascular development and the roles of TGF-beta signaling components.
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