Two Yale biologists receive Gairdner International Award

Two Yale biologists were among five scientists to win 2006 Gairdner International Awards, among the most prestigious in science. The awards will be presented in October in Toronto.

Joan A. Steitz, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is being honored for her discovery of snRNPs (pronounced “snurps”), complexes of protein and RNA that edit and splice other RNA strands to form messenger RNA, the genetic recipe used by the cell’s protein-making machinery.

Thomas D. Pollard, M.D., chair and Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, is being recognized along with his colleague Alan Hall, Ph.D., of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, for discovering the molecular basis of cellular motility and the mechanism of its regulation. This fundamental knowledge is required to understand embryonic development, defense against infections and the spread of malignant tumors in the body.

Founded in 1959, the Gairdner International Awards recognize achievements in medical science.

In 2004, another Yale scientist received a Gairdner Award. Arthur L. Horwich, M.D., HS ’78, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was honored for his findings on protein folding and its relevance to neurodegenerative diseases.

Curtis Patton retires from research and international health

When Curtis L. Patton, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology (microbiology) and director of international medical studies at the School of Public Health, describes his career in public health, his memory goes back to his boyhood in Birmingham, Ala., when he contracted malaria. He can’t prove it after so many years, but he suspects he got the disease at a waterhole near his home, where he and his friends caught tadpoles and crawfish. The water was stagnant and dirty, but that didn’t seem to matter to the boys. “Pushing one another into the water was a wonderful game,” he recalled in a recent interview. “I found out after I was in college that this was an open sewer.”

Patton has spent his career studying tropical diseases, specifically the trypanosomes that cause malaria. Among his most memorable experiences, both professional and personal, were trips to the Brazilian Amazon to protect indigenous tribes from the diseases that followed civilization, to Kenya to study trypanosomes and tsetse flies, and to Senegal to study the public health implications of damming the Senegal River.

Patton retired in July after 36 years at Yale. Along with his research he will also be remembered for steering the Downs International Health Student Travel Fellowship program that has sent more than 400 students in medicine, public health, nursing and the Physician Associate Program abroad since it began in 1966. Students are expected to travel to a region of the world that has not only an underserved population, but is also one where they haven’t lived or worked before. “We decided it would be a better experience if students went to places that would stretch them culturally, underserved areas where there really was a need to find out what the problems were, not just in public health, but in medicine,” Patton said. One of his retirement projects is a study of the effects of the Downs program on participants. Anecdotally, he observes, “They come back more mature. They come back more committed.”

Patton believes this is an important program for students. “This is a formative period of their lives,” he said. “It’s not just about getting a Nobel Prize for studying malaria. It is about developing as an individual, as a student who is going to go ahead and make the kind of progress we want students to make.”

Prusoff is awarded Parker Medal for role in discovery of AIDS drug

William H. Prusoff, Ph.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in pharmacology, received the Peter Parker Medal, which honors service to the university, on April 17. Prusoff and his colleague Tai-Shun Lin, Ph.D., discovered the antiviral properties of d4T, or stavudine, in 1986. Marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb as Zerit, it became one of the leading drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS. Dean Robert J. Alpern, M.D., presented the medal to Prusoff at the ceremony held at the Union League Cafe.

Notes

Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., professor and chair of psychology, professor of epidemiology and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, has been named in Time magazine’s list of 100 “People Who Shape Our World.” Brownell, one of the list’s scientists and thinkers, was cited for his efforts to reduce obesity in the United States. Also on the list are President Bush, actor George Clooney, model Tyra Banks, Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and rap artist Sean Combs.

Elizabeth B. Claus, M.D. ’94, Ph.D. ’94, associate professor of public health (biostatistics), has been awarded a five-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, for the first large national effort to study risk factors associated with a diagnosis of meningioma, the most frequently reported of primary intracranial neoplasms. This study is important because of the lack of information about the disease, the large number of patients with this diagnosis and this tumor’s frequent association with neurological complications and decreased quality of life.

John A. Elefteriades, M.D. ’76, HS ’81, FW ’83, professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery, received the prestigious Socrates Award for Excellence in teaching and mentoring of residents at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons in Chicago in January. Elefteriades also received the Program Director Award for the best resident paper, titled “What Is the Optimum Treatment for Late Presenters With Acute Type A Aortic Dissection?” The paper was presented by Ryan R. Davies, M.D. ’01, who carried out the research while he was the Winchester Fellow in Cardiothoracic Surgical Research at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Alison Galvani

Alison Galvani, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Public Health’s Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, has been named a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of past achievements and on the promise of future achievements. Galvani was awarded the fellowship based on her research on the public perception of influenza vaccination policies.

Nigel D.F. Grindley

Nigel D.F. Grindley, Ph.D., professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, has been elected to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. Fellows are chosen for their contributions to basic science and for advancing progress in research and industry. Grindley studies DNA transposition and site-specific recombination.

Charles Lockwood

Charles J. Lockwood, M.D., the Anita O’Keefe Young Professor of Women’s Health and chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, and Errol R. Norwitz, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, are among six scientists who will share $2.4 million from the March of Dimes for research into premature births. The three-year prematurity research initiative grants will fund efforts to predict and prevent premature births.

Alexander Neumeister

Alexander Neumeister, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry, was awarded the CINP 2006 Bristol-Myers Squibb Max Hamilton Memorial Prize in July. The CINP, Collegium Internationale Neuropsychopharmacologicum, is an international group of scientists interested in neuropsychopharmacology, basic science and clinical issues such as treatment. The $10,000 award is given to scientists under the age of 41 who have made important research contributions to the field in the area of depression.

Peter Novick

Peter J. Novick, Ph.D., professor of cell biology, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Novick, an expert on vesicle trafficking and cell polarity in yeast, joins more than 130 other Yale faculty as a fellow of the Cambridge, Mass.-based academy.

Jody Sindelar

Jody L. Sindelar, Ph.D., professor of public health, has been named the inaugural president-elect and current vice president of the newly formed American Society of Health Economists (ASHE). Sindelar, who studies the economics of smoking, alcohol and illicit drugs, is a founding member of ASHE, a professional organization dedicated to promoting excellence in health economics research in the United States.

Scott Strobel, Ph.D., was named chair of the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B) for a three-year term that began July 1. Strobel succeeds Nigel D. F. Grindley, Ph.D., who has led the department since 2003. Also this spring, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) named Strobel as one of its new HHMI professors chosen for the quality of their teaching, inspiration and mentoring. Strobel will receive $1 million over four years to implement innovative science teaching ideas. HHMI will provide the resources for Strobel to take undergraduates “bioprospecting” for promising natural products in the world’s rain forests. The students will then purify and analyze the compounds they collect and test them for potentially beneficial activity.

Richard Torres, M.D. ’99, M.P.H., assistant clinical professor of medicine and chief medical officer of Optimus Health Care, which includes Bridgeport, Stratford and Stamford Community Health centers, was selected to the National Health Leadership Fellowship Program by the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and the National Hispanic Medical Association. Torres was one of only 10 physicians selected in America, and the only physician from New England.

Barry Wu, M.D., HS ’92, associate clinical professor of medicine, received the Herbert S. Waxman Award for Outstanding Medical Student Educator from the American College of Physicians on April 6 in Philadelphia.


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Autumn 2006. Copyright © 2006 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.