Awards & Honors - March 14

Awards & Honors archived.

Yale doctoral candidate wins prestigious national award

Paula Montero Llopis was one of 12 students from North America to win the 2011 Harold Weintraub Graduate Student Award for excellence in the biological sciences.

The award is sponsored by the Basic Science Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and is named for the molecular biologist who worked there and died of brain cancer in 1995 at the age of 49.

Montero Llopis, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, investigates where within bacterial cells key events in the transfer of genetic information take place. Montero Llopis has devised ways to visualize the location within the cells of messenger RNAs, which carry information encoded in DNA. Her work has shown that the locations of these messages have great impact on cellular processes.

Llopis receives an honorarium and travel expenses to a symposium of award winners organized by the cancer research center.

Yale receives grant to study evolution of biopolar disorder

Hilary P. Blumberg, associate professor of psychiatry and the director of the Mood Disorders Research Program at the School of Medicine, has been awarded a $3.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to expand her research on bipolar disorder.

Blumberg’s lab will use brain imaging and genetic tests to study bipolar disorder in adolescents and adults. Researchers plan to track changes in brain circuitry as the diseases progresses from adolescence to adulthood and identify genes related to this progression.

Bipolar disease is characterized by severe mood swings, alternating between manic
and depressed phases and has an age of onset between 15 and 25 years. It is one of the leading causes of suicide.

The goal of the research is to find new ways to intervene early in the disease process and to develop new therapies based on the age and genetics of individual patients.