Grantsmanship for Students and Postdocs: F30, F31, F32

Organizer

Yaihara Fortis-Santiago

The New York Academy of Sciences

Keynote Speaker

Jaime S. Rubin, PhD

Columbia University

Jaime S. Rubin, PhD, received a BS in physics sigma pi sigma in 1977 from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (New York, NY). She then received the MS and PhD degrees from the Ontario Cancer Institute / University of Toronto in 1980 and 1984, respectively. Her PhD thesis, published in the journal, Nature, described the first molecular identification and characterization of a human DNA repair gene. Since 1985, she has held a number of senior level positions at Columbia University's Medical Center, including Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs, having served as the founding Director of the Office of Graduate Affairs, and Acting Associate Vice President / Acting Associate Dean for Research Administration, having served as one of the founders of the Office of Research Administration. She is currently the Vice Chair for Investigator Development in the Department of Medicine. All of these positions have allowed for the teaching and mentoring of junior investigators, including medical, public health, nursing, and graduate students, medical and dental residents, postdoctoral fellows and scientists, and assistant professors.

Dr. Rubin founded (in 1995) and continues to direct the graduate level course "Funding and Grantsmanship for Research and Career Development Activities" and served as the Associate Program Director for the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship Program, having helped develop and initiate this successful program at Columbia in 2000. She started and continues to co-direct the Medical Center's course on "Responsible Conduct of Research and Related Policy Issues." Other career development roles include serving as Associate Director for Career Development on a number of NIH-funded pre-doctoral and postdoctoral training grants, fellowships, and junior faculty career development awards, as well as an advisory board member of Columbia's Patient-Oriented Research (POR) Master of Science Program and CTSA (Education).

Panelists

Katherine Xu

PhD Candidate, Department of Medicine/Nephrology, Columbia University

Katherine is a fifth year graduate student in the Nutritional and Metabolic Biology Doctoral Program at Columbia University Medical Center. She is carrying out her thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Barasch, studying the role of the kidney in iron balance during injury and infection. Her work is supported by the NIH/NIDDK Kirschstein NRSA F31 Fellowship. Katherine completed her undergraduate BS degree in Biology at Duke University, where she also carried out biomedical research in Nephrology. She then obtained her MS degree in Human Nutrition at Columbia University before entering the doctoral program.

Maomao Zhang, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Maomao Zhang is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she studies how the tumor microenvironment promotes tumor progression using zebrafish as a model system. She completed her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied cell biology and embryonic development. Her love of science and research first started as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where she worked in a breast cancer lab to characterize the transcriptional regulation of estrogen receptors.

Margaret E. Warren

PhD Candidate, Department of Genetics & Development, Columbia University

Margaret is a third year graduate student in the Genetics & Development Doctoral program at Columbia University. Her thesis research is being performed in the laboratory of Professor Boris Reizis. One of the primary goals of her research is to further our understanding of the role that dendritic cells play in immunity and human pathology. This work will be supported by the Kirschstein-NRSA Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (F31) at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to pursuing a doctoral degree, Margaret earned a BS in biology at Rutgers University Newark College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, she completed a Master's in Business and Science degree at the Graduate School of Rutgers University supported by a National Science Foundation's fellowship.