Four postdocs honored with 2016 Tri-Institutional Breakout Awards
Kate Meyer, Ph.D.
Four young life scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medicine are the winners of the 2016 Tri-Institutional Breakout Awards for Junior Investigators. The awards, established last year by three winners of the 2013 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, honor outstanding postdoctoral investigators at the three institutions. The recipients each receive a $25,000 prize.
The winners of this year's Breakout Awards are: Nicholas Arpaia of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Richard Hite and John Maciejowski of Rockefeller, and Kate Meyer of Weill Cornell Medicine.
The seed money for the Breakout Awards came from three investigators — Charles L. Sawyers, M.D., of Memorial Sloan Kettering; Cori Bargmann, Ph.D., of Rockefeller; and Lewis C. Cantley, Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine — who each received a $3 million award from the 2013 Breakthrough Prize. The three institutions have also contributed funds.
The awards are given annually to between three and six promising postdoctoral trainees, with one prize given to an applicant from each of the three institutions and additional awards made to the best candidates regardless of tri-institutional affiliation. A committee of faculty members from each of the institutions selects awardees based on their research accomplishments, the impact of their science, and the likelihood of their success as independent investigators. The contributing Breakthrough Prize recipients are not involved in the selection of the winning postdocs.
"I am continually impressed by the caliber of these investigators," said Dr. Cantley, the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and a professor of cancer biology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. "They are innovators, risk takers, and architects of the next big breakthroughs. This award acknowledges their successes and provides them with some financial benefit at a key time in their careers."
As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Samie Jaffrey, professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, Meyer investigates how RNA modifications regulate gene expression. RNAs were for many years thought to be primarily composed of four chemical building blocks: A, G, C, and U. Together, these four RNA bases generate a code that instructs the cell's machinery to produce proteins; the precise order of the letters determines what kinds of proteins the cell makes. Meyer's research has demonstrated the existence of a fifth base, revealing thousands of cellular RNAs that contain it and illuminating a whole new layer of RNA regulation. This new base, called m6A, can control gene expression during the cellular stress response, a pathway that has been implicated in many human diseases. In her new laboratory at Duke University, Meyer plans to continue researching the fundamental aspects of gene expression control mediated through RNA modifications, with a particular emphasis on understanding how these pathways act in the nervous system.