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Dr. Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a member of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. His work has focused on structure-function relationships for the estrogen receptors in breast and lung cancers, and development and study of various ligands that activate or block its function. He is also developing random library-based methods of RNA interference (RNAi) with Dr. R. Steinman. Dr. Nichols got his B.A. degree in Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University where he studied transfer RNA synthesis, RNA Polymerase III transcription, and tRNA suppressor genetics in yeast. His did post-doctorate work with Gunther Schutz at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany. There his EMBO Fellowship focused on identification and characterization of proteins that interact at a liver-specific enhancer upstream of the tyrosine aminotransferase (TAT) gene where cell-specific and hormone-inducible transcription signals act in liver cells. He then moved to the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany where he worked on the human Estrogen Receptor and FLP site-specific recombinases. | 