Dr. Chris Bakal received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, where he completed an honors thesis in Microbiology under the supervision of Dr. Julian E. Davies (Davies Autobio.pdf) on the subject of novel tyrosine kinases in streptomycetes. His doctorate work in Medical Biophysics was performed at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Robert Rottapel, where he worked on signaling pathways regulating the cytoskeleton during cell division and the immune response. Dr. Bakal joined the laboratory of Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 2004. In 2006, he became an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a postdoctoral fellow he has developed novel image-based technologies to quantify cell shape in collaboration with the laboratory of George Church. Moreover, in collaboration with the laboratory of Enrique Martin-Blanco, Dr. Bakal has recently developed methods to quantify signaling events at subcellular resolution in the context of high-throughput combinatorial screens. He is currently working with laboratory of Bonnie Berger on systems-level models of dynamic signaling networks.

Dr. Bakal was a fellow of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society from 2005-2009, during the course of which his research efforts were twice honored by the Society’s volunteers. In 2007 he was awarded the Dorsett L. Spurgeon Award as the top postdoctoral fellow or junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School. In 2009 he received an Outstanding Research Award from Nature Biotechnology.

In the fall of 2009, Dr. Bakal will move to the Chester Beatty Laboratories at the Institute of Cancer Research as a Team Leader in the Section of Cell and Molecular Biology where he will assume a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship.