On Nov. 28, 2018, the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and the George Washington University Institute for Neuroscience jointly sponsored the Robert A. Oakley Memorial Lecture in developmental neurobiology. This annual lecture was established in 2005 in memory of our esteemed colleague, Bob Oakley, a junior faculty member who was nationally recognized for his pioneering work on barriers to axon outgrowth (with Kathy Tosney) and the requirement of neurotrophin-1 for muscle spindle afferent neuron specification and differentiation (with Eric Frank, Ron Oppenheim, and Beverly Karpinski). This year, Marianne Bronner, PhD, the Albert Billings Ruddock Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and international leader in the field of sensory neuron development, presented her laboratory’s work on its discovery of gene regulatory interactions that underlie several different aspects of neural crest development.
