Schedule of Events
Monday, March 18, 2013
- 9:30 am - Breakfast Reception 3rd Floor Lecture Hall, Forchheimer Bldg.
- 10:00 am - 12:00 pm - Student Presentations & Awards Ceremony, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall, Forchheimer Bldg.
- 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm - Poster Session and Reception, Lubin Dining Hall
2013 Awardees
Laura Barreyro - Molecular characterization of stem and progenitor cells in acute myeloid
leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes
Mentor: Dr. Ulrich G. Steidl
Clarissa Melo Czekster - Mechanistic characterization of enzymes involved in tetrahydrofolate
biosynthesis in Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Mentor: Dr. John S. Blanchard
Hashem A. Dbouk - Regulation of p110β signaling and functions by interacting proteins
Mentor: Dr. Jonathan M. Backer
Xiaoxuan Jia - Gamma rhythm and its relationship with neuronal activity in early visual cortex
Mentor: Dr. Adam Kohn
About Dr. Julius Marmur
Julius Marmur is remembered today as one of the founding fathers of molecular biology and for his enthusiasm and dedication to education.
He developed the first method to isolate highly purified and high quality DNA. He was involved in the definitive experiments demonstrating the hybridization of DNA strands and the physical characteristics of DNA annealing. His lifelong commitments to DNA structure, yeast genetics and graduate education are celebrated annually by the Marmur Research Awards. Julius Marmur was a member of the Einstein faculty for thirty-three years.
Born in Poland and educated in Canada, Dr. Marmur moved from McGill University in Canada, to Iowa State, followed by short stays at the NIH, Rockefeller University and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. At Harvard, he collaborated with Paul Doty and Carl L. Schildkraut (currently Professor of Cell Biology here at Einstein) to generate technologies to manipulate and study DNA structure and function. The techniques that Marmur developed emerged as some of the most powerful methods for the study of modern microbial genetics. He and his colleagues developed the cesium chloride gradient method to separate small circular DNAs from genomic DNA. He defined the characteristics of DNA strand separation, renaturation and hybridization. After Harvard, he moved to Brandeis and then to Einstein, as a Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Genetics. At Einstein, he pioneered the use of yeast as an organism for genetic and biochemical studies.
Julius Marmur had many additional responsibilities, professional, civic and personal. He was an enthusiastic and dedicated teacher, with a deep concern for the welfare and education of his students. He was always available to help students with scientific problems. He would have been particularly pleased to see his name associated with a prize for the most promising young scientists at the Graduate School to which he dedicated so much of his life.
Photo Credit (Scientific Image) - Sami Hocine, Artistic Rendering of Single Molecule Imaging: MS2 and PP7 RNA-labeling strategies are utilized for visualization of single mRNA transcripts inside living yeast cells. MS2-labeled transcripts (magenta) and PP7-labeled transcripts (green) are imaged simultaneously, demonstrating a system in which the expression of two RNA species can be followed in real-time. Fusion of a fluorescent protein to histone H2A2 is used to visualize cell nuclei (blue) in order to place RNA expression levels within the context of cell cycle stage. Sami is PhD student in the laboratory of Dr. Robert H. Singer, Department of Anatomy & Structural Biology.