Abby Sarkar, a PhD candidate in the lab of HSCI Principal Faculty member Konrad Hochedlinger, PhD, and a Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, has been named the 2013 Mignone Fellow. Her work focuses on the intersection of stem cell and cancer biology and will be supported by the generosity of the Roberto and Allison Mignone Fund for Stem Cell Research.
Sarkar is working with Hochedlinger on a project that uses the mouse as a model system to characterize and study the activity of stem cells in the normal stomach and in the presence of cancer. This project has already contributed to the developing understanding of stem cell activity in the stomach. This collaboration, which typifies the kind of research by the next generation of scientists that HSCI is eager to support, is exploring the relationship between stomach stem cell activity and the development of stomach cancer, and ultimately seeks to identify ways to improve early diagnosis and provide better therapeutic targets for treatment.
The Roberto and Allison Mignone Fund for Stem Cell Research was established with a generous gift from Roberto A. Mignone ’92, MBA ’96, and Allison H. Mignone ’94, MBA ‘95, to support graduate student research in stem cell and regenerative biology on HSCI-sponsored research projects.
HSCI is also proud to announce that Richard Sherwood, PhD, whose work was advanced by support of a Sternlicht Fellowship, has recently had a manuscript titled, “A multiparametric flow cytometric assay to analyze DNA-protein interactions,” published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. Sherwood is currently an Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and conducts diabetes research in the lab of HSCI Principal Faculty Richard Maas, MD, PhD.