Nadya Dimitrova wins 2009 Weintraub Graduate Student Award

Nadya Dimitrova, a graduate fellow in Titia de Lange’s Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University, has been named one of this year’s recipients of the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, administered by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Ms. Dimitrova is one of 13 awardees, all advanced graduate students at or near the completion of their studies in the biological sciences and chosen for the quality, originality and significance of their thesis research.

Ms. Dimitrova’s research is focused on the repair of double-strand breaks, the most lethal and dangerous form of DNA damage. In her thesis project, she has characterized a novel mechanism by which the protein 53BP1 increases chromatin mobility at DNA lesions, a function that promotes efficient and accurate DNA repair.

The Weintraub Award, established in 2000, honors the late Harold M. Weintraub, a founding member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s basic sciences division who died from brain cancer in 1995, at the age of 49. Weintraub was an international leader in the field of molecular biology who, among other contributions, identified genes responsible for cell differentiation. The Hutchinson Center is a research institution dedicated to collaboration between interdisciplinary scientists and humanitarians, with the goal of preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer, HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

The award recipients, announced yesterday, will participate in a scientific symposium at the Hutchinson Center in Seattle on May 1, and will receive an honorarium from the Weintraub and Groudine Fund, established to foster intellectual exchange through the promotion of programs for graduate students, fellows and visiting scholars. Past recipients of the award at Rockefeller University include Sung Hee Ahn-Upton, 2007 graduate of C. David Allis’sLaboratory of Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics; Vanessa Ruta, 2005 graduate of Roderick MacKinnon’s Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics; Paul Cohen, 2003 graduate of Jeffrey M. Friedman’s Laboratory of Molecular Genetics; Karina Del Punta, 2003 graduate of Peter Mombaert’s Laboratory of Developmental Biology and Neurogenetics; and Agata Smogorzewska, 2002 graduate of de Lange’s lab.