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Krause (front and center) with her lab team at Yale.
Diane Krause was supposed to be making frantic arrangements right now to welcome 500 scientists, students, and state leaders to New Haven to share knowledge with and about the city’s booming bioscience scene.
Then came the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
So, like so many other people whose plans have been upended by the emergence of the virus, Krause has had to switch gears: Wednesday she was putting out the word that the gathering has been postponed for up to a year. While continuing to work with colleagues at the Yale biology lab she runs to find ways to keep their research going without endangering their health.
The gathering, StemCONN2020, was scheduled to take place March 24 at the Omni Hotel.
The hundreds of visitors planned to present findings of stem cell research performed during the growth of the industry in the state over the past two decades; to share other findings from beyond Connecticut and abroad; and to interest high school and college students in entering the field.
Krause, a medical professor and bioscience research at Yale since 1994, has played a role in convincing the state to invest in stem cell research and in staging the annual StemCONN.
The need to postpone the biannual StemCONN — amid a statewide edict to avoid gatherings of 100 or more people for fear of spreading the deadly virus — was a disappointment for Krause, but the need to protect public health came first, she said during an interview Wednesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. She intends to reschedule the event once the threat passes.
“We’d love to have it in the fall, but that tends to be an incredibly busy time” for academic conferences, she said. A more likely date will fall in 2021.
Krause, the daughter of a doctor, grew up in Pittsburgh knowing, by the time she was in high school, that she wanted to pursue a career in science. Today she oversees an eponymous lab in Yale’s Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology that uses mice “as a genetic model to study how adult stem cells … can contribute to wound healing, and can be a factor in cancer formation.”
It’s tough to do that work remotely. So she and her colleagues are trying to figure out how to keep the experiments going in the lab while avoiding much direct contact with each other. They’ve been scheduling fewer, and smaller, meetings. They have also staggered work schedules so they can be in the lab at different times.
When Yale lured Krause here back in 1994, she said, she was one of only two stem cell researchers.
Since then, at the urging of Krause and other researchers, the state and other funders have invested in stem cell research that aims to find ways to prevent or cure diseases ranging from diabetes and cancer to sickle cell anemia and Alzheimer’s. Today, some 600 people work on stem cell research in 95 different Yale labs, according to Krause.
Yale itself was embarking on a new attitude toward scientific research when Krause arrived. A new Yale president, Rick Levin, was starting a 20-year tenure at the time. He reversed a past policy of skepticism toward the idea of aggressively promoting commercial applications of university research; the fear was that commercial dictates would steer research toward the goals of private enterprise over the pursuit of pure academic study. Under Levin, and since, Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research has worked hard to help STEM researchers take ideas to market and found companies, partly to promote scientific solutions to health problems and partly to help create local jobs. Krause said she has not encountered or seen problems with commercial concerns steering research away from its idealistic goals.
Click on the video below for the full interview with Diane Krause on WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven,” in which she discusses her stem cell research in more detail.