2005 Student Award Winners

Chun-Mei Lu, recipient of a travel award from the Histochemical Society to attend the annual meeting, received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from Tamkang University of Taipei in 1987, and MS (1989) and Ph.D. (1999) degrees from the National Tsing Hau University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in the laboratory of Heinz-Ulrich Weier. Her work involves use of bacterial artificial chromosome clones for breakpoint mapping. Novel clone pooling strategies are used to accelerate delineation of chromosome translocation breakpoints. In vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis benefit from breakpoint maps of the preparation of patient-specific probes for selection of normal offspring. Her address is: Dept. of Subcellular Structure, Life Sciences Div., Univ. of California, O.E. Lawrence Nat. Lab., MS 74-157, 1 Cyclotron Rd., Berkeley, CA 94720

Natalia V. Gounko received the Ralph Lillie Award of the Histochemical Society at the annual meeting in the Netherlands. She earned a B.S. in Biology in 1999 and a Magistrate degree in Neurobiology in 2001 from the St. Petersburg State University in Russia. Currently, she is a doctoral student at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in the Department of Cell Biology, working in the laboratory of Professor Han van der Want. Her major area of interest is developmental neurobiology. Organotypic cerebellar slice cultures are used to investigate the role of corticotropin releasing factor and urocortin in Purkinje cell dendritic development. Her work supports the function of urocortin as a regulator of transcription of target genes; whereas, the major function of corticotropin releasing factor may be to regulate the distribution of trans-membrane proteins in the postsynaptic membrane, most probably via cytoskeletal changes. Her address is: Dept. of Cell Biology, Lab. for Electron Microscopy, Antonius Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands

Subrina Jesmin received a Histochemical Society Travel Award, and the Vector Laboratories Young Investigators Award for the 2005 Joint meeting in the Netherlands. She received an M.D. from the University Rajshahi, Bangladesh in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine, Sapporo, Japan in 2003. She has done post-doctoral work at the Hokkaido University in Sapporo and at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her work centers on the vascular biology field, with a special interest in cardio- and cerebrovascular circulation. Rat and mouse models are used to study diabetes, hypertension, stroke, estrogen deficiency, and sepsis. She investigates morphological alterations, specifically molecular and genetic changes in the micro-vasculature of heart and brain. Different cardio- and neuro-protective drugs are used in these disease models to observe their effects on cardiac and cerebral micro-circulations. Her address is: The Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Inst. of Clinical Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8575, Japan