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Faculty Detail     Name DANIEL A GORELICK   Campus Address VH 254 Zip 0019 Phone 205-934-4565 E-mail danielg@uab.edu Other websites http://gorelicklab.org

Faculty Appointment(s) Appointment Type Department Division Rank Primary  Pharmacology/Toxicology   Pharmacology/Toxicology Chair's Office Assistant Professor Center  Comprehensive Cancer Center  Comprehensive Cancer Center Assistant Professor

Biographical Sketch  Dr. Gorelick received his BA in music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He received his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Medicine in 2005 working in the lab of Peter Agre at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Gorelick was an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Embryology, in the lab of Marnie Halpern. In 2008-2009, Dr. Gorelick worked as a science adviser in the US Department of State as a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. He joined the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at UAB in 2012.

Society Memberships Organization Name Position Held Org Link American Association for the Advancement of Science  member  http://www.aaas.org  National Postdoctoral Association  member, treasurer (2009-2010)  http://www.nationalpostdoc.org/  Organization for the Study of Sex Differences  member  http://www.ossdweb.org/  The Endocrine Society  member  http://www.endo-society.org/

Research/Clinical Interest Title Steroid and endocrine disruptor signaling during development Description Chemicals in the environment that mimic endogenous hormones can profoundly affect organismal development. These small molecules, termed endocrine disrupting compounds (EDC), include insecticides, industrial chemicals and pharmaceutical products that are released or escape into the environment. Animals are especially sensitive to EDC exposure during critical periods of development, embryonic stages when organs and tissues are specified and formed. EDCs have been shown to affect the development and function of many organs including the brain and gonad. Great strides have been made correlating chemical exposure with abnormal phenotypes, but identifying the molecular pathways that mediate such abnormalities has been an elusive goal. Recent advances in our understanding of genetic pathways that regulate development, however, are bringing this goal within reach. Using the zebrafish model system, it will be possible to identify how chemicals in an animal’s environment influence gene activity and affect development. During my postdoctoral fellowship, I developed an innovative approach to monitor one class of EDCs, those that mimic estrogens, in live zebrafish embryos and larvae in multiple tissues at single cell resolution. Humans are exposed to EDCs throughout life and exposure has been linked to birth defects, cancers and autoimmune diseases. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand in which tissues EDCs act and their mechanisms of action. Projects include: 1) identify the function of estrogen receptor alpha activity during heart valve development 2) develop tools to monitor androgen, progesterone and aryl hydrocarbon receptor activity in vivo and identify novel sites of activity during development 3) identify tissue-specific endocrine disrupting compounds from environmental samples and uncover their mechanism of action 4) determine to what extent estrogen signaling in the brain influences sexual differentiation of the gonad

Selected Publications  Publication PUBMEDID Gorelick DA, Halpern ME. Visualization of estrogen receptor transcriptional activation in zebrafish. Endocrinology. 2011 152(7):2690-703.   21540282  Gorelick DA, Watson W, Halpern ME. Androgen receptor gene expression in the developing and adult zebrafish brain. Dev Dyn. 2008 237(10):2987-95.  18816841

Keywords zebrafish, estrogen, nuclear hormone receptor, endocrine disrupting compounds, signal transduction, developmental biology, genetics

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