Leslie De Groot, M.D., Professor
Dr. De Groot trained at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He served in the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health and in Afghanistan, and spent 12 years at MGH and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. While at UC, Dr. De Groot was the head of the Thyroid Study Unit as well as head of the Endocrine Section. He joined the Endocrine Division at Brown University in January 2005 and moved to the University of Rhode Island in 2009.
Research accomplishments include purification of thyroid peroxidase and identifying it as the typical antigen in thyroid autoimmunity, recognition of the Thyroid Hormone Resistance Syndrome and cloning the mutated receptor genes involved, identification of the CTLA-4 gene as a common contributor to many human autoimmune diseases, development of an adenoviral vector for therapy of medullary thyroid cancer, and numerous studies on therapy of thyroid cancer. His research interests have centered on viral mediated gene therapy for thyroid cancer and genetic mechanisms promoting auto-immune thyroid disease. Recent studies pin-point the role of specific acidic aminoacids in determining the importance of T cell epitopes of the TSH-receptor, the role of regulatory T cells in Graves’ disease, and methods for augmenting function and number of Tregs. Having been a practicing thyroidologist for several decades, the final goal in Dr. De Groot’s research is to use this information to develop methods to combat autoimmune thyroid disease in patients. De Groot has more that 400 publications and received the Endocrine Society award as “Distinguished Educator” in 2004. Perhaps his best known publication is the three volume textbook “Endocrinology” which he edited through six editions over the past 30 years. He is currently excited by the educational possibilities of the two web books he directs, www.endotext.org and www.thyroidmanager.org, which receive over 80,000 hits each day from 6000 visitors around the world.
Chris Bailey-Kellogg, Ph.D., Visiting Professor
Chris Bailey-Kellogg joined iCubed in June 2011 while on sabbatical as an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. He earned a B.S. and M.S. with Sandy Pentland at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. with Feng Zhao at Ohio State and Xerox PARC, and conducted postdoctoral research with Bruce Donald at Dartmouth. He was an assistant professor at Purdue before being recruited back to Dartmouth. He has received an NSF Career award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, along with regular grants from the NIH, NSF, and other organizations. Research in his lab focuses on embedding computation as a core component in elucidating three-dimensional structures of proteins and protein complexes, and in engineering protein variants. By tightly integrating computation with experiment, they seek to optimize experiments so as to maximize information gain while minimizing experimental complexity.
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