User:Alvaro Monteiro

My education includes a Bachelor of Science in Biology (Genetics), and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During my training, which focused primarily on the role of extracellular factors in liver diseases, I had the opportunity to work in France (Institut Pasteur de Lyon), Belgium (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and Japan (Okayama University).

In 1994 I was awarded a Pew Foundation fellowship to conduct postdoctoral training with Lasker Award winner Hidesaburo Hanafusa at the Rockefeller University in New York City. Although my initial projects were on the regulation of Src family kinases, I started to investigate the functional role of the (then recently cloned) breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1. I discovered one of the first clues to the function of BRCA1 in transcriptional regulation (Monteiro et al. PNAS 1996). This discovery set the stage for the beginning of my independent career as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University. From 1998 until 2003 my laboratory at Cornell produced the first papers proposing the use of functional assays to complement genetic testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2 (Hayes et al. Cancer Res. 2000; Vallon-Christersson et al. Human Molecular Genetics 2001). In collaboration with structural biologists and computational scientists we also pioneered the use of structural information to predict the impact of mutations in BRCA1 (Mirkovic et al. Cancer Res. 2004). In 2004 I moved to Moffitt Cancer Center as a tenure-track Associate Professor in the Cancer Epidemiology Program and in the Department of Oncologic Sciences at the University of South Florida. I also hold appointments in the Department of Biology (College of Arts & Sciences) and the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology at the USF College of Medicine. Since 2010 I have served as the Chair of the Breast Cancer Information Core Database (BIC) Steering Committee. The BIC is an NIH/NHGRI-based locus specific database that centralizes all documented alleles of BRCA1 and BRCA2 and is extensively used by researchers, patients, genetic counselors, and clinical geneticists.