Joseph DeRisi of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, will be the speaker at a genomics colloquium Friday, Feb. 19, at 4 p.m. in Cornell University's Biotechnology Building G01. The lecture is free and open to the public.

DeRisi is a pioneer in developing the DNA trademarked technology known as MicroArray for studies of genome-wide expression of genes. MicroArray is a prototype of the next generation of chip technologies for the analyses of functional genomics. The technology encodes on a microchip the responses of large numbers of genes to simple cellular signals.

DeRisi developed the technology while still a graduate student at Stanford University. He has used it to study a wide range of problems, from melanoma and suppressed human melanoma cells to the transcriptional program of sporulation to drug screens in budding yeast.

The colloquium is sponsored by Cornell's Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology and Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Genomics Initiative.