Aldebaran Hofer, PhD
Dr. Aldebaran M. Hofer is currently Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School / Brigham and Women Hospital and Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for Research at the VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, USA. Dr. Hofer did her Ph.D. training in the field of physiology with Terry Machen at the University of California, Berkeley, devising optical methods to directly monitor calcium handling in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Her subsequent postdoctoral training with Irene Schulz (Homburg/Saar, Germany) and later with Tullio Pozzan (Padova, Italy) extended this work on ER calcium signaling. Her laboratory currently applies a wide range of molecular and biophysical techniques for probing interactions between cyclic AMP (cAMP) and Ca2+. Her team discovered a new signal transduction pathway that connects calcium levels within the ER lumen to the activation of the enzyme that generates cAMP, adenylyl cyclase. Current projects involve newly developed approaches to monitor and tune cAMP in various subcellular compartments using targeted genetically encoded sensors and tools. Dr. Hofer is on the Editorial Board of Cell Calcium and the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. Her laboratory is supported principally through grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs.