2003 Student Award Winners

Tomoko Furuya, recipient of Ralph D. Lillie Award and an HCS Travel Award at our annual meeting in San Diego, Her presentations were: "Multiplex quantitative analysis of intracellular materials by cell array system" and "The development of a novel device, multiplex-immunostain chip, for immunohistochemical examination". She received her B.Sc in pharmaceutical science from Kyoto University in 1991 and the MD degree from Yamaguchi University School of Medicine in Ube in 2000. She is currently a graduate student at Yamaguchi University School of Medicine and works to develop new technologies for cell biology with Professor Kohsuke Sasaki in the Department of Pathology.

Liping Luo received the Vector Laboratories Young Investigator Award and an HCS Travel Award in San Diego. Her presentation was entitled, "Detection of DNA alterations in human aberrant crypt foci and colon cancers by random primed polymerase chain reaction". She received the MD degree in 1987 at the West China University of Medical Sciences and her Ph.D. in 2002 at the Karolinska Institute. She is currently a research associate in the Department of Pathology, Case Western Reserve University and works with Theresa P. Pretlow. Her work is to determine if genomic instability occurs in human aberrant crypt foci (ACF). ACF are monoclonal and represent the earliest histologically detected neoplastic precursor of cancer observed in grossly normal colonic mucosa. Genetic alterations and epigenetic changes can cause chromosome deletions and loss of information during the process by which a normal epithelial cell becomes neoplastic. Current work is focused on: a) the kinds of genetic and epigenetic alterations that may take place during the pathogenesis of colon neoplasia, b) whether these genetic and epigenetic alterations are associated with specific phenotype(s), and c) whether specific molecular changes can be detected as markers for precursors of colon cancer.

Hanna Ojaniemi received an HCS travel award to attend the 2002 annual meeting. Her presentation at the HCS minisymposium on signal transduction was entitled, "Approaches for using clinical samples with microarrays". In 2002 she received her MS degree in Chemical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm (Sweden). The main subject of her education was Biomedical Engineering. She is currently a PhD student at the Karolinska Institute (KI) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) (Stockholm, Sweden) and her mentors are Drs. Birgitta Evengard (KI) and Peter Nilsson (KTH). She works with gene expression analysis using the microarray technology, which will be applied on a chronic fatigue syndrome cohort. Since August 2002 she has been a guest researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Atlanta, GA) working with microarrays. She recently returned to Sweden to continue her studies. At the CDC she worked with resonance light scattering that uses gold particles for detection. This technology is more sensitive compared to fluorescent dyes that are mainly used today, which facilitates the use of lower sample amounts suitable for clinical use.

At the annual meeting Kevin Niswender was recipient of Presley-Zeiss Postdoctoral Fellow Award from the American Association of Anatomists and an HCS travel award. His oral presentation was entitled, "Histochemical detection of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase activation in intact cells." He received his B.S. in Biology from the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, and his M.D. and Ph.D. in Molecular Physiology and Biophysics from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. His work focuses on understanding the molecular physiology of key neurons found in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus that regulate energy homeostasis and body adiposity. His mentors for this work are Drs. Denis Baskin and Michael Schwartz. He is currently located at Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington in Seattle. His hobbies are photography, bonsai, and cooking.