Congratulations to the
2011 winners
The GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists supports and rewards promising young scientists in their research in the field of molecular biology. Since 1995, the Prize has been awarded to over 81 winners from around the world.
Dr. Erez Lieberman Aiden
Grand Prize Winner and Regional Winner, North America
Essay: Zoom!
Dr. Erez Lieberman Aiden grew up in New York City and studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Princeton University. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard and MIT, where he was advised by Eric Lander and Martin Nowak.As a student in the Lander lab, Erez worked with Nynke van Berkum to develop a new method for determining the 3D structure of nuclear DNA, and discovered that the human genome folds into a dense, unknotted structure known as the fractal globule. Erez also developed a new, quantitative approach for the analysis of culture together with Jean-Baptiste Michel. Erez has received the NIH New Innovator Award, the American Physical Society’s Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics, and the Lemelson-MIT student prize, given to the best student inventor at MIT. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. Erez lives at Harvard’s Pforzheimer House with his wife Aviva and his son Gabriel Galileo.
» See film with Erez Lieberman Aiden
Dr. Eran Eden
Regional Winner
All Other Countries Essay: Proteome Dynamics and Fate the of Individual Cancer Cells in Response to a Drug
Dr. Eden was born in Haifa, Israel. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Following a student exchange visit to the Center for Biological Sequencing in Denmark, he became fascinated with molecular biology and returned home to pursue a B.A in Biology and an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the Technion. His Ph.D. research, conducted under the guidance of Prof. Uri Alon at the Weizmann institute of Science in Rehovot, focused on studying the proteome dynamics and half-lives of individual living human cancer cells. Since completing his Ph.D., he co-founded MeMed Dx, a start-up company in the field of personalized diagnostics of infectious disease, where he and his colleagues are developing disruptive technologies aimed at reducing antibiotics misuse.
» See film with Eran Eden
Dr. Felipe Karam Teixeira
Regional Winner
Europe Essay: Mechanisms of Transgenerational DNA Methylation Inheritance
Dr. Teixeira was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received a B.Sc. in biological sciences and a M.Sc. in genetics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He completed his Ph.D. (University of Paris XI) under the supervision of Vincent Colot, first at the Unité de Recherche en Génomique Végétale (Evry, France) and then at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France). His research work focused on the mechanisms of transgenerational DNA methylation inheritance in Arabidopsis. He is now a postdoctoral fellow in Ruth Lehmann’s lab at the New York University Medical Center/Skirball Institute, where he is studying the mechanisms involved in the regulation of transposable elements during Drosophila germline development.
» See film with Felipe Karam Teixeira
Dr. Tatsuya Tsukahara
Regional Winner, Asia
Essay: CDK Directs the Chromosome Passenger Complex to Centromeres for Chromosome Bi-Orientation
Dr. Tsukahara was born in Japan and graduated from the University of Tokyo in 2005. He conducted his Ph.D. work in the laboratory of Yoshinori Watanabe at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, University of Tokyo, where he studied the molecular mechanism of faithful chromosome segregation using fission yeast and human cells. Tsukahara is currently an Assistant Professor in the laboratory of Hiroyuki Takeda at the Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo. He has moved into the field of developmental biology, and is studying the epigenetic regulation of vertebrate development and differentiation using medaka fish.
» See film with Tatsuya Tsukahara
