Rusty Lansford

Rusty Lansford is an Investigator at the Saban Research Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Dr. Lansford’s did his undergraduate research in Dr. Marian Koshland’s lab investigating transcription regulation of the J chain gene, a protein component of antibodies IgM and IgA. His graduate work in Dr. Fred Alt’s lab studied immunoglobulin class switch recombination and B cell development. As a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Scott Fraser’s lab at Caltech, Rusty studied embryo patterning and development. He continued his studies at Caltech as an Investigator developing transgenic, fluorescent protein (FP) expressing Japanese quail as an amniote model system to directly manipulate and dynamically visualize normal and abnormal embryogenesis. He also developed new microscope tools and approaches to image embryo development dynamically. Toward this end, he co-invented the multispectral tools and software now sold by Zeiss Microscopy.

Dr. Lansford’s group at USC and CHLA use a combination of experimental, computational and theoretical approaches to quantitatively understand decision making in single cells and tissues with a focus on questions in vascular, neural, and germ cell development. They have engineered a quiver of new molecular tools that permit molecular perturbation to be induced in vivo with extreme spatiotemporal accuracy and generated new multispectral fluorescent sensors to assay changes in cell behaviors resulting from the molecular disruptions. More recently, Rusty has been working with the artist John Carpenter to design a gestural interface system to explore and visualize 4D image sets of heart development.

Dr. Lansford has been recognized for some of his work with an R&D 100 Award winner for development of META multispectral imager (along with Greg Bearman, Scott Fraser, and Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH), NASA Space Act Award for Two-photon Microscope Imaging Spectrometer for Multiple Fluorescent Probes (along with Greg Bearman and Scott Fraser), and a Bridge Art + Science Alliance award “New Ways of Seeing the Pattern: Exploring Heart Formation in a Gestural Interface System” (along with John Carpenter).