News

Andreas Bergmann, PhD, has received a five-year, $3.5 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award from the National Institutes of Health.

UMass Medical School scientist Craig L. Peterson, PhD, has received a five-year, $4.5 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health for research that explores the role chromosome structure plays in regulating gene expression, DNA repair and DNA fidelity during cell division.

Dohoon Kim, PhD, was named a 2017 Suh Kyungbae Science Foundation Young Investigator Award recipient. The accompanying $2 million, five-year grant will support research into changes in metabolic pathways that support cancer cells.

Four faculty members have been appointed to endowed professorships at UMass Medical School in recognition of their contributions to biomedical research, education and patient care. Each will be formally invested Sept. 13 at the Convocation and Investiture ceremony.

The new drug, patisiran, approved Aug. 10 by the FDA, is based on the discovery of RNAi made by Craig Mello, PhD, and Andrew Fire, PhD. It was developed by Alnylam, an RNAi-based drug development company co-founded by Phillip Zamore, PhD.

Researchers at UMass Medical School have developed a genome-editing strategy to correct disease-causing DNA mutations in mouse models of human genetic diseases. Dan Wang, PhD, is first author and Guangping Gao, PhD, is a co-corresponding author on the paper published in the Aug. 18 edition of Nature Biotechnology.

Guangping Gao, PhD, has been ranked one of the world’s top translational researchers, according to a new tabulation from Nature Biotechnology. The Top 20 Translational Researchers of 2017, published this month by Nature Biotechnology, places Dr. Gao fourth.

Job Dekker, PhD, creator of high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (known as Hi-C), and a team of researchers have developed a new computational framework combining optical mapping, Hi-C, and whole genome sequencing to find what are called “structural variants” within cancer genomes and learn more about how such cancers begin.

As part of UMass Medical School’s ongoing initiatives to share news about the research, academic and service achievements that take place every day on our campuses, a new magazine debuts this week, @umassmed.

Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dean Mary Ellen Lane, PhD, welcomed and congratulated 52 graduate students entering the transformative years of their doctoral research during the GSBS Qualifying Exam Recognition Ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 18.