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| Rich Schneider is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Director of the Molecular & Cell Biology Laboratory in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Rich earned a B.A. from Hampshire College and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University. His training also includes time at the National Museum of Natural History, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Rich moved to UCSF in 1998 for a Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2001, he joined the faculty of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Throughout his career, Rich has studied the role of the neural crest during development and evolution of the vertebrate head. As an undergraduate he used three-dimensional morphometrics to quantify ontogenetic and phylogenetic skull shape changes and test hypotheses of heterochrony among domestic dogs and wild canids. For his doctoral work, Rich analyzed the phenotypes of over twenty different types of mutant mice and performed cell transplants between quail and chick embryos, in order to elucidate mechanisms that pattern the head skeleton. His current research continues along these lines and employs a chimeric system devised to exploit the morphological differences and highly divergent maturation rates separating quail and duck embryos. His approach provides a potent method for identifying and manipulating signaling pathways that mediate the spatiotemporal patterning and differentiation of tissues such as cartilage, bone, muscle, epidermis, and nerve. |
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