Student Awards

John O'Donnell accepts his fellowship award

John O'Donnell, 1^st year graduate student in Neuroscience, was selected to be a recipient of the Merritt & Marjorie Cleveland Fellowship Award. The fund was established in 1991, with a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Merritt Cleveland. The fund supports a first year graduate student entering graduate study through the Graduate Education in the Biomedical Sciences Program with an interest in developing a neuroscience-related research career.

Grayson Sipe accepts his fellowship award

Grayson Sipe, 1^st year graduate student in Neuroscience, was selected to be a recipient of the Graduate Alumni Fellowship Award. Graduate Alumni in the School of Medicine and Dentistry established this Fellowship Award to recognize incoming student's promise for exceptional accomplishment in graduate study.

First year graduate students in Neuroscience Kelli Fagan, Julianne Feola, John O’Donnell, Fatima Rivera-Escalera, Grayson Sipe were appointed to the Neuroscience Training Grant. It is a prestigious appointment funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health. Adam Pallus, second year student has been reappointed to this grant for academic year 2010-2011.

KyungHwa Lee, Ph.D., a former student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, has received the Robert Doty Award of Excellence in recognition of outstanding dissertation research in neuroscience. For her thesis research, Dr. Lee joined the laboratory of Dr. Douglas Portman. In her research, she established for the first time that the 294-neuron non-sex-specific component of the C. elegans nervous system is in fact an important focus of regulation by the sex of the animal.

Her work opened up a new dimension of plasticity of this system: not only is its function regulated by developmental stage, experience and environmental conditions, it is also modified according to the chromosomally determined sex of the animal. Moreover, Dr. Lee's work showed that, in C. elegans, sexual status acts cell-autonomously to regulate the function of specific cells. As the first part of Dr. Lee's thesis, this work was published in 2007 in Current Biology. Currently, KyungHwa Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Coleen Murphy at Princeton University.

Dr. Robert Doty was a leading brain researcher who helped create what is now the world's largest organization of neuroscientists, the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Doty had served the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry since 1961, a central figure to a team of people that has made the University an internationally recognized powerhouse in neuroscience.