Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 PRiME Fellowship Competition! PRiME Fellows represent the next generation of scientific leaders, testing bold ideas that enable interdisciplinary research in precision medicine. The 2022 cohort of awardees are exceptional trainees working on projects that combine expertise across the four PRiME Faculties, applying molecular biology, genomics, computational biology, and bioengineering towards diagnostic and therapeutic solutions.
The new cohort of fellows this year will lead diverse research projects from identifying novel therapeutics (cancer, atherosclerosis, muscle disease), designing DNA nanotechnology and omics approaches to creating novel intranasal vaccine for COVID-19.
The annual PRiME Fellowship competition provides funding to PhD students or postdoctoral fellows with innovative ideas that enable high-risk, high-reward research. Projects are collaborative, with co-supervision by PRiME investigators across the Faculties of Arts & Science, Applied Science & Engineering, Medicine, and Pharmacy. Fellows will be provided stipend support by PRiME for one year and assisted in leveraging their scientific progress to obtain further funding for the next stage of research activity in the lab and technology development.
Introducing the 2022 Awardees (in alphabetical order):
Rebecca Allan, PhD Candidate
Supervisors: Drs. Patrick Gunning & Leonardo Salmena
“Novel Allosteric First in Class DNAJ-PRKACA Inhibitors for the Treatment of Fibrolamellar Hepatocellular Carcinoma”
Travis Douglas, PhD Candidate
Supervisors: Drs. Leo Chou & Omar Khan
“Spatially defined and decorated DNA nanoparticles to investigate macrophage polarization”
Yechen Hu, Postdoctorate Fellow
Supervisors: Drs. Aaron Wheeler & Penney Gilbert
“Multi-Omics Analysis of Muscle Stem Cell Induced Muscle Disease”
Funing Lin, PhD Candidate
Supervisors: Drs. Rob Batey & Walid Houry
“Synthesis and characterization of biorelevant ADEP conjugates that target the human ClpP protease to develop novel anticancer therapeutics”
Dominic Owens, Postdoctorate Fellow
Supervisors: Drs. Cheryl Arrowsmith & Gary Bader
“Targeting nucleotide stress responses and ribosome biogenesis in cancer through inhibition of the CTLH complex”
Sarah Shawky, PhD Candidate
Supervisors: Drs. Carolyn Cummins & Milica Radisic
“Vasculature- and heart-on-a-chip platforms to investigate novel anti-atherosclerotic proteins secreted by liver X receptor (LXR)-modified endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs)”
Daniel Tabet, PhD Candidate
Supervisors: Drs. Frederick Roth & Michael Garton
“Modeling the LDL-LDLR interaction with comprehensive sequence-function data”
Andrew Varley, Postdoctorate Fellow
Supervisors: Drs. Bowen Li, Scott Gray-Owen & Jennifer Gommerman
“A novel intranasal vaccine based on bivalent circular RNA for mucosal immunity against COVID-19”