Professional Awards 2005

From the July 21, 2005 New York Times, "RNA Comes Out of the Shadow of Its Famous Cousin." In this recent article, Nicholas Wade seeks to explain two recent studies on microRNA. microRNA discoverer, Victor Ambros, with his colleagues Rosalind Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum, found a gene called lin-4. When the gene was activated, its messenger RNA folded itself up into a little hairpin twist, and that was its product, a microRNA molecule. Read the article to learn more about this amazing discovery.

Charles Brenner, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Genetics and Biochemistry, has had the honor of having his recent publication, "Seidle, H.F., Bieganowski, P., and Brenner, C. Disease-Associated Mutation Inactivite AMP-Lysine Hydrolase Activity of Aprataxin. J Biol Chem 280:20927-20931 (2005)" selected for "Paper of the Week" from the more than 6,000 articles published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry each year. This distinction is made by the Journal's reviewers who are asked to nominate papers they judge to be in the top one to two percent of papers to be published in the JBC each year. Dr. Brenner's paper focuses on a particular protein associated with a rare neurological disease, ataxia-oculamotor apraxia syndrome 1.

Jay C. Dunlap, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics and Chairman of Genetics, is the 2005 recipient of the newly unveiled Metzenberg Award. The award, which honors its recipient for contributions in the field of Neurospora genetics, was presented to Dr. Dunlap at the 2005 Fungal Genetics Conference in Asilomar, CA in March.

Victor Ambros, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics, is a co-recipient of the 2005 Thirty-Fourth Annual Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in the Basic Medical Sciences and was honored at a symposium at Braindeis University in May. Read about it in News @ DMS.

Arriving at Dartmouth Medical School in August (2004), Jason Moore, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Genetics, becomes the founding director of Dartmouth Medical School's Computational Genetics Laboratory, as well as the director of the Cancer Center's Bioinformatics Shared Resource. Dr. Moore's Bioinformatics Shared Resource is developing software and providing computer programming and database support for biomedical researchers and the Computational Genetics Laboratory is developing, evaluating, and applying computational and statistical methods for detecting genetic biomarkers of common human diseases. (Laura Stephenson Carter, Dartmouth Medicine, Winter 2004)

Michael Whitfield, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Genetics, has been named by the Molecular Biology of the Cell Editorial Board as the recipient of the 12th MBC Paper of the Year Award. Mike will present his article, Identification of Genes Periodically Expressed in the Human Cell Cycle and Their Expression in Tumors (June 2002 issue of MBC), at the ASCB meeting in California in December.

Victor Ambros, Ph.D. and Rosalind Lee, both of Genetics, received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the best paper published in Science during 2002 for "An Extensive Class of Small RNAs in Caenorhabditis elegans" to be presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in February; Science named the discovery of these tiny RNA's the breakthrough of the year. Ambros was also recently selected to serve as a judge for the 2002-03 Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology for high school students, where the top prize in the team category went to a project in genetics, an area Ambros was asked to judge. Complete article.