Nicholas Marsh-armstrong

Biography

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Dr. Marsh-Armstrong graduated magna cum laude with his bachelor's degree in chemistry and philosophy at Haverford, where he won the Undergraduate Award in Analytical Chemistry. He went on to pursue graduate work in neuroscience and cellular and developmental biology at Harvard, receiving his doctoral degree in 1994. He then served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the Department of Embryology until early this year, when he came to Hopkins and Kennedy Krieger Institute as an assistant professor. Dr. Marsh-Armstrong was the recipient of the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard in 1991, and was a recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral fellowship and a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research post-doctoral fellowship. RESEARCH SUMMARY: During development, a symphony of gene expression sets up the structure and function of the nervous system. Dr. Marsh-Armstrong's lab focuses on the use of transgenic technologies to shed light on the rules that govern developmental gene regulation in the nervous system. His ultimate goal is to understand how aberrant gene regulation leads to developmental disorders. To date, Dr. Armstrong's efforts have been directed at studying amphibian metamorphosis. A tadpole’s transformation into an adult frog is an example of a complex developmental gene regulatory program that is choreographed by a single molecule, thyroid hormone. In one frog species, Xenopus laevis, the surge in thyroid hormone at metamorphosis produces changes in proliferation and cell death throughout the nervous system, and results in the emergence of new neural structures, new physiology and new behavior. More recently, Dr. Marsh-Armstrong has turned his attention to human gene regulation, taking advantage of the high-throughput nature of transgenesis in Xenopus frogs and the wealth of information emerging from the completion of the human genome. Transgenic studies in mice have been successful in studying questions of gene regulation on a gene-by-gene basis, but transgenic methodology in mice is laborious and expensive. Dr. Marsh-Armstrong has shown that using Xenopus laevis frogs, an individual researcher can generate daily hundreds of transgenic animals easily and inexpensively. Mammalian promoters expressed in Xenopus show the same expression pattern that they show in mice. This makes Xenopus an ideal vertebrate model organism in which to conduct a high-throughput transgenic study of human gene regulation.

Research Interest

Neuroscience