Associate Professor Sean Millard

I received a BA in Biology from Columbia University in New York City. After taking two years off to work as a research assistant, I began graduate school at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, also in New York. My graduate advisor was Andrew Koff at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. I studied the cdk inhibitor, p27, and discovered that it is regulated at the level of translation as cells exit the cell cycle. I received my PhD in Molecular Biology in 2001. My postdoctoral work was carried out in Larry Zipursky's lab at UCLA. Here, I learned both Drosophila genetics and neurobiology and began working on the Dscam-family of cell recognition molecules. I identified Dscam2 as the first tiling receptor and discovered that Dscam2 and Dscam1 are redundantly required for photoreceptor synaptic specificity. I moved to Brisbane and began as a lecturer at the UQ School of Biomedical Sciences, in December 2009. I am also an affiliate of the Queensland Brain Institute.