Two UW students and a recent graduate of the School of Medicine have received 2004 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Awards in recognition of their research. The Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center sponsors the awards.

Thomas Fazzio and Michael Andres McMurray, who are in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, a joint program at the FHCRC and the UW School of Medicine, each won the award. Jason David Fontenot, who received his Ph.D. in immunology from the UW last December, also received a Weintraub award.

The contest recognized 17 graduate students in the United States and Canada for the quality, originality, and significance of their work. The students will present their award-winning research at a symposium May 7 to May 8 at the FHCRC.

Fazzio, who studies chromatin regulation in yeast cells, works in the lab of Toshio Tsukiyama, assistant member of the FHCRC and affiliate associate professor of biochemistry at the UW. McMurray works with Daniel Gottschling, member of the FHCRC and affiliate professor of genome sciences at the UW, in studying age-induced genomic instability in yeast cells. Fontenot is examining the molecular mechanisms controlling the development and function of a type of regulatory T cell.

The Weintraub awards were established in 2000 to honor the late Harold M. Weintraub, a founding member of the FHCRC's Basic Sciences Division who died of brain cancer in 1995. Weintraub, a leading molecular biologist, identified the genes responsible for instructing cells to differentiate into specific tissues.