Barbara Graves, PhD, is professor of the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She is a member of the Nuclear Control Program of the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Dr. Graves joined the faculty of the University of Utah in 1986 in the Department of Cellular, Viral and Molecular Biology. Upon the foundation of the Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1994 she became one of the founding members of the Department of Oncological Sciences. She served as Department Chair for 10 years as well as Senior Director for Basic Science at HCI for 4 years.
Graves research focuses on how genes are turned on and off by regulatory proteins called transcription factors. Transcription is the process by which genetic code information passes from one cell to another. This gene expression process is essential for normal cell behavior and often goes awry in a cancer cell. A thorough understanding of how transcription factors and other molecular mechanisms control gene expression can lead to innovative new therapies and treatments for a variety of cancers. Graves's current focus is ETS transcription factors which are altered in human sarcomas, prostate cancer, and a variety of hematological malignancies.
A graduate of Rice University, Graves earned her PhD from the University of Washington and completed postdoctoral training at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Dr. Graves currently spends part of her time in the Washington, DC area serving as a Senior Scientific Officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Research Statement
We have set as a long-term goal to understand how a family of highly related DNA binding factors is utilized in biological regulation using the ETS family as a model system. Do individual ETS proteins have unique roles or are there redundancies of function within the family? Specificity would require both a divergence of functionality of individual family members as well as pathways to direct different family members to different gene promoter targets. There is extensive co-expression of ETS family members in a diverse sampling of human cell types. Genome-wide analysis of promoter targets in several of the cell types shows that, in some cases, there is specific matching between specific ETS proteins and specific targets. In other cases, there is co-occupancy by multiple ETS proteins at a specific promoter. We are currently investigating mechanisms of specificity for multiple family members including Ets-1, ETV6, ETV1, ETV4 and ETV5.
