Each year, outstanding Ph.D. students are nominated for the Medical Faculty Association’s "Best Research Awards". Due to the pandemic, the 2020 award selection process was postponed. The Office of Graduate Studies at the Miller School of Medicine is pleased to finally announce the following winners:
First Place
Cameron Bader, Microbiology and Immunology (Mentor: Robert B. Levy, Ph.D.)
Dissertation Title: The Contribution of the Innate Immune Sensor STING in GVHD and GVL following Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation
Cameron became the first graduate student at the University of Miami to receive the prestigious F99/K00 pre-doctoral to post-doctoral transition award. Initiated about 5 years ago, the NCI distributes up to 25 of these new awards nationally which provide funding for both the final 2 years of graduate studies and then 3 years of postdoctoral funds which can be taken to whatever laboratory is selected by the student. This last summer (2020) Cameron’s work was published in Science Translational Medicine and he just had a first-authored review article accepted to Blood (in press, 2021).
Second Place
Sze Kiat Tan, Cancer Biology (Mentor: Scott M. Welford, Ph.D.)
Dissertation Title: Adipokine mediated metabolic rewiring drive clear cell Renal Cell Carcinoma
After two years at the University, Owen decided to pause his medical school training to enroll in the Ph.D. program in Cancer Biology, and complete an unconventional M.D./Ph.D. He has developed the project in several innovative directions and has just submitted a revised manuscript for publication in Cancer Discovery. Once published, the paper will add to his already impressive three first-author publications (one review, and two peer-reviewed papers) that he published at the University prior to graduate school admission, and one first-author paper recently published while in graduate school.
Third Place
Clara Troccoli, Cancer Biology (Mentor: Priyamvada Rai, Ph.D.)
Dissertation Title: Redox vulnerabilities as therapeutic targets in castration-resistant prostate cancer
Clara is currently an NCI F31 fellow and is working on a translationally impactful project investigating novel therapeutic pathways in castration-resistant prostate cancer, an incurable and fatal disease, through testing the efficacy of repurposing FDA-approved drugs used in non-cancer indications. She is currently spearheading a project based on a novel target identified in a transcriptomics-based screen in our lab which implicates downregulation of soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC) signaling as a critical component of CRPC emergence and progression. For the last two years, she has spent a great deal of time designing, optimizing, and conducting ‘preclinical trials’ with riociguat in xenograft models of castration-resistant prostate cancer.
Fourth Place
Rosamary Ramentol, Physiology and Biophysics (Mentor: H. Peter Larsson, Ph.D.)
Dissertation Title: Gating Mechanism of HCN Pacemaker Channels
Rosamary became the laboratory’s voltage clamp fluorometry expert, and, now, she shares her expertise with the others in the laboratory. Rosamary eventually found some very interesting results that were published as an article in Nature Communications and that she presented as an oral presentation at the Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in 2020.
