February 2015 News
Yoshi Azuma (associate professor) is the recipient of a Research Project Grant (R01) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for his proposal entitled “Regulation of kinetochore function by topoisomerase II.” The aim of this four year grant is to determine the molecular mechanism of topoisomerase II, one of the major targets of cancer chemotherapeutics, on the checkpoint of the cell division cycle.
Scott Hefty (associate professor) was awarded a Provost's Strategic Initiative - Level II Research Investment Grant for Enabling Technology for Chlamydia pathogenesis. The funds are primarily in support of personnel learning murine models of Chlamydia infection from colleagues at Harvard Medical School and the University of Arkansas Medical Center to establish proficiency of these models at the University of Kansas.
Josie Chandler (assistant professor) and John Karanicolas (associate professor) are part of a team of scientists to receive a University of Kansas Level 1 Strategic Initiative Grant from the Research Investment Council. The project is titled “Validating bacterial iron metabolism as a target for antibiotic discovery.” The project leader is Mario Rivera (Chemistry) and other members of the team are Bill Picking (Pharmaceutical Chemistry), Lester Mitcher (Medicinal Chemistry) and Richard Bunce (Chemistry, OSU). The award was highlighted in this month’s “KU Discovery and Innovation” bulletin.
Dr. Raymond Caylor (doctoral graduate, Ackley Lab) will be starting a research coordinator position at the Pediatric Genomic Medicine Center at Children’s Mercy Hospital on February 2.
Andrew McShan (graduate student, De Guzman lab) returned from a semester-long internship at Genentech in South San Francisco, CA. During this time he worked for Dr. John Wang in the Department of Late Stage Pharmaceutical Development where he evaluated the propensity of different surfactants to undergo enzymatic hydrolysis by carboxylester hydrolyases from a broad range of organisms. His work has direct implications for future development of protein drug formulations. The internship was in fulfillment of his NIH-supported Biotechnology Predoctoral Training Program.
Justin Massey (undergraduate, Hefty Lab) is a recipient of a Spring 2015 KU Undergraduate Research Award. This $1000 award will be used to support an independent research project on developing conditional gene repression mechanisms in Chlamydia trachomatis.
