San Diego Branch Awards
It has been an incredibly successful quarter for the LICR San Diego Branch, with two prestigious scholarships and one excellent grant being awarded to three young laboratory heads. Our congratulations go to Drs. Arshad Desai, Karen Oegema, and Bing Ren.
Dr. Arshad Desai has been selected as one of this year's five Damon Runyon Scholars. The scholarship from The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation will support the establishment of Dr. Desai’s newly-formed Laboratory of Chromosome Biology, which is investigating mitotic chromosome segregation at a molecular level. In awarding the scholarship to Dr. Desai, the review panel judged that his current and past research show him to have great promise for future contributions that will lead to understanding the causes and mechanisms of cancer and to developing more effective cancer therapies and preventions.
Dr. Karen Oegema, head of the Laboratory of Mitotic Mechanisms, has been awarded a PEW Scholarship. The PEW Program supports young investigators of outstanding promise in basic and clinical sciences that are relevant to the advancement of human health. The PEW Scholarships are very prestigious; one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry is a PEW Scholar, as is Dr. Ellen Puré, Director of the LICR Office of Academic Review.
Dr. Bing Ren, head of the Laboratory of Gene Regulation, was awarded one of the first ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project grants in a three-year, $36 million mission aimed at discovering all components of the human genome that are crucial to biological function. ENCODE will be carried out by an international consortium of scientists from academia and industry, and will be funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the USA. Dr. Ren’s grant will support his work in mapping transcriptional regulatory elements in the human genome.