2004 Winners
Grand prize: Saba Valadkhan
Saba Valadkhan received the grand prize for her essay, "Construction of a Minimal, Protein-Free Spliceosome." Dr. Valadkhan was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She attended medical school at Iran University of Medical Sciences from 1989 to 1996 and in 1993 placed fourth in the country in the nationwide Basic Sciences Medical Board Exam. She moved to the United States in 1996 to attend graduate school at Columbia University, New York. Here she studied the role of small nuclear RNAs in the human spliceosome under the supervision of Prof. James Manley. While at Columbia University she received awards for both teaching and research. Her thesis was recognized with a Harold Weintraub award from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle. In 2004 she joined Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as an assistant professor and was named a Searle Scholar the same year.
North America: Benjamin Tu
Benjamin Tu for his essay, "Deciphering Disulfide Bonds." Dr. Tu was born in Stanford, California, but grew up in Pennsylvania. From a young age he was fascinated by math and science, and one of his fondest high school memories is of participating in the 53rd Westinghouse Science Talent Search. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he did biochemistry research in the laboratory of Dr. James C. Wang. After graduating in 1998, he headed west to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco. He was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship and joined the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan S. Weissman to work on a long-term problem in protein folding--how disulfide bonds are formed in proteins that traverse the secretory pathway. Dr. Tu obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 and moved to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Steven L. McKnight with a fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. He is currently studying the metabolic cycles of yeast and hopes to apply what he learns to the study of circadian rhythms. In his spare time, he enjoys ultimate frisbee, tennis, ping-pong, puzzles, and starcraft.
Europe: Christian Haering
Christian Haering for his essay, "A Ring for Holding Sister Chromatids Together?" Dr. Haering grew up in Bavaria, Germany, and began studying biochemistry at the University of Regensburg, Germany, in 1994. As a participant in an exchange program (German Academic Exchange Service), he spent time at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. There he studied the catalytic mechanism of the telomerase reverse transcriptase in fission yeast in Prof. Thomas R. Cech's laboratory. He graduated with a diploma in biochemistry in 1999 and in 2000 joined Prof. Kim Nasmyth's group at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. During his graduate studies, he collaborated with Dr. Jan Lšwe at MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology, so that he could apply structural biology as well as genetic and biochemical techniques to understanding the molecular mechanism of cohesion. Dr. Haering showed that the cohesin complex, required for proper chromosome segregation during cell division, forms a large ring structure with the potential to hold sister chromatids together by trapping them inside rings. His work was recognized with the Austrian Cell Cycle Publication Award in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 and has recently moved to the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, UK, where he plans to continue working on the mechanism of the cohesin complex.
Japan: Kunihiko Nishino
Kunihiko Nishino for his essay, "Analysis of Drug Exporter Gene Libraries Based on Genome Information and Study of Their Regulatory Networks." Dr. Nishino was born in Kyoto, Japan. As an undergraduate at Kyoto Pharmaceutical University, he studied antibiotic resistance mechanisms of bacteria under the guidance of his father, Prof. Takeshi Nishino. In 1998, he joined the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Osaka University. There he continued to explore antibiotic resistance in the laboratory of Dr. Akihito Yamaguchi, where he developed a postgenomic approach to understanding the regulation and function of xenobiotic exporters. In 2001, he was awarded a Research Fellowship for Young Scientists from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in 2002 he received the Kuroya Award from the Japanese Society for Bacteriology. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2003, he collaborated with Dr. Takeshi Honda at the Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, Osaka University, to extend his knowledge of bacterial pathogenesis. He is now a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Eduardo A. Groisman at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri.
All Other Countries: Suvendra Bhattacharyya
Suvendra Bhattacharyya for his essay, "Mitochondrial tRNA Import: Glimpses of a Complex Molecular Machine." Dr. Bhattacharyya was born in 1975 in Calcutta, India. He attended Presidency College, University of Calcutta, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1996 and his master's degree in biochemistry in 1998. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Samit Adhya at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB), Calcutta, with a research fellowship from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Government of India. In Dr. Adhya's laboratory, he purified the first mitochondrial RNA import complex (RIC) and established an allosteric stepwise transfer model of tRNA import in Leishmania mitochondria. After completing his Ph.D. in 2003, he went to Basel, Switzerland, to join Prof. Witold Filipowicz's group at Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI), Novartis Research Foundation, with postdoctoral fellowships from the European Molecular Biology Organisation and the Human Frontier Science Program Organization. At FMI he is engaged in research on microRNA metabolism in mammalian cells. In 2004, he received the Young Scientist Award of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), India.
