University of Michigan College of Pharmacy Group

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Gus Rosania obtained his B.S. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University. There he was student of two great thinkers of twentieth century cell and developmental biology, who would profoundly influence his future research: Dr. Paul Green, from the Department of Biology, and Dr. Daniel Mazia at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, CA (where Gus spent the summers).

Afterwards, he joined the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, and obtained his Ph.D. degree laboratory of Prof. Joel A. Swanson, now also at the University of Michigan. Prof. Swanson introduced him to the physicochemical basis of cell function and behavior, and to the theory and experiment of fluorescence imaging microscopy. His Ph.D. thesis examined the cytoskeletal control of cell motility in macrophages, using chemical agents and automated image analysis. This led to an interest in cell based screening assays for studying the mechanism of action of small molecules, and in the use of fluorescence microscopy to study the dynamics of molecular transport and solute-solvent flow in cells.

In 1997 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Peter G. Schultz, then Howard Hughes Investigator at the Department of Chemistry in the University of California-Berkeley, and now Director of the Novartis Institute of Functional Genomics and Professor at the Scripps Research Institute. At the time, Prof. Schultz was best known for his work on combinatorial chemistry, catalytic antibodies, and unnatural amino acid site-directed mutagenesis. As a post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley he began characterization of the mechanism of action of 2,6,9-trisbustituted purines, a combinatorial library of ATP-site directed kinase inhibitors. Gus initiated phenotypic cell based screening efforts of combinatorial libraries of compounds in the search for compounds with regeneration-inducing activity, leading to the discovery of myoseverin, a small molecule microtubule inhibitor that induced mammalian myotube dedifferentiation; and aminopurvalanol, a CDK inhibitor for inducing cancer cell differentiation and apoptosis.

In 1999, he moved to Cellomics, Inc., a biotech company in Pittsburgh, PA. In collaboration with Zeiss and Cellomics engineers, he was one of the inventors of the KineticScan, the first fully automated kinetic screening imaging system and perhaps one of the most sophisticated fluorescence imaging systems ever built. In 2001, he joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences as Assistant Professor, to share his knowledge of cell biology, chemical genomics, and image-based high throughput screening, and pursue new rational drug design strategies

Currently, he is Assistant Professor at the College of Pharmacy, faculty affiliate of the Bioinformatics Program and Member of the U of M Comprehensive Cancer Center. He serves as member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Molecular Pharmaceutics. Prof. Rosania has received a numberr of awards, including the Upjohn-Vahleteich award at the College of Pharmacy, the 2004 Premio Colombia Exterior (Outstanding Colombians in the United States) and most recently, the 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

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