4:59 p.m., March 12, 2008--Marcy MacDonald, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and associate neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, will deliver UD's Clark Lecture at 5 p.m., Wednesday, April 23, in 100 Wolf Hall. Her topic will be “A Genetics-driven Approach to Huntington's Disease Therapeutics.” The event is open to the public.

MacDonald received her doctorate in medical biophysics from the University of Toronto in 1980. She is a founding member of the Molecular Neurogenetics Unit and the Center for Human Genetic Research and a member of the Basic Biological Sciences Program at Harvard Medical School. She directs the Molecular Neurogenetics Unit Genotyping Resource and the Chromosome Substitution Strain Resource.

Her research focuses on a molecular genetic approach to understanding inherited human diseases of the nervous system. MacDonald and her colleagues have used genotype-phenotype studies to discover gene mutations that cause Huntington's disease and Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis.

The late Dr. Arnold M. Clark, who died in 2003 at the age of 87, was a biology professor at UD from 1946-81 and helped launch the graduate program in biological studies. He is known for his support of medical genetics and genetic counseling at a time before genetics was taught in medical schools. Dr. Clark was a member of the Genetics Society of America and the American Society of Human Genetics.