Weintraub Graduate Student Awards Honor Research

Two UW students and a graduate of the School of Medicine received 2004 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Awards in recognition of their research. The Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) 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 a Ph.D. in immunology from the UW in 2003, also received a Weintraub award.

The contest selected 17 graduate students in the United States and Canada for the quality, originality, and significance of their work. The students presented their award-winning research at a symposium.

Fazzio, who studies chromatin regulation in yeast cells, works in the lab of Dr. 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 exams the controls for the development and function of a type of regulatory T cell.

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

Michael Andres McMurray

Thomas Fazzio