The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) named two of our own IBP faculty to their 2024 class of fellows today. The AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific societies. To be named an AAAS fellow is a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.
Congratulations to Dr. Amy Rowat for receiving a two-year grant from the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health! The title of her research project is “Identifying Novel Targets for Cancer Using High Throughput Deformability Screening.” The primary goal is to discover novel therapeutic strategies for ovarian cancer by identifying mediators and regulators of cellular mechanics using a novel screening platform. Findings should lead to new opportunities to control cancer and improve patient outcomes.
Kacie Deters, Valerie Tornini, and Stephanie White were awarded $50k seed grants from the UCLA-CDU Dana Center for Neuroscience and Society
Lillian Jackson, a graduate trainee from the Alward lab, discovered male and female cichlids perform both the same and sex-typical behaviors and the neural basis of these behaviors are different for each sex. In one brain area implicated in aggression, the ventromedial hypothalamus (see image), males but not females showed elevated neural activity during aggression.
Dr. Amy Rowat was recently named one of this year’s Allen Institute Allen Distinguished Investigator. The Allen Distinguished Investigator program supports early-stage research with the potential to reinvent entire fields. Dr. Rowat’s cohort project for this grant is, “Mechanobiology tools for dissecting drivers of membrane mechanics, form, and function.”
Professors Xiao, Yang, and Villanueva recently publish a new article in Cell Reports, “PPARy-dependent remodeling of translational machinery in adipose progenitors is impaired in obesity”. Their cover illustration was also chosen for this issue.
Professor Amy Rowat, recently appointed as the inaugural faculty director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies, oversees the Future of Food Fellows Program. This is a new fellowship program that seeks to help graduate students become future leaders in the emerging field of cellular agriculture
Dr. Alward and Mélanie Dussenne, a postdoc from the Alward lab, published an article on the expression of novel androgen receptors in three GnRH neuron subtypes in cichlids in the Journal of Neuroendocrinology, where their microscopy image was chosen for the cover of the current issue.
Dr. Giovanni Quinones-Valdez, postdoc in the Xiao lab, was awarded the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2024 Trainee Research Excellence Award. The award was announced at the ASHG annual meeting last week.
Only six trainees (three predoctoral, three postdoctoral) were selected for the award, among over 800 applicants, which is a significant professional accomplishment.
Dr. Stephanie Leal has been named a Fellow to the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM) at UC Irvine, a multidisciplinary team of scholars spanning the globe. This honor is given to faculty members who were nominated by a current fellow and who received a majority vote during the voting process. The CNLM Fellows represent one of the world’s top “think tanks” in neuroscience. With an average of $20 million each year in federal funding to support high impact research programs, as well as over 10,000 citations per Fellow, they are revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and its disorders, creating innovative neurotechnologies, and improving brain health on a global scale. See a list of current fellows here: https://cnlm.uci.edu/about/fellows/
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