Fall 2008 Intramural Research Award Winners

DCEG Intramural Research Awards (IRAs) are competitive funding opportunities designed to encourage innovative, interdisciplinary research by Division fellows and tenure-track scientists. The IRA program includes spring and fall cycles with as many as three proposals awarded at up to $50,000 each.

IRA Winners: Laufey Amundadottir, Nicolas Wentzensen, and Jonine Figueroa.

After a vigorous competition, three winners have been announced for fall 2008. They are Laufey Amundadottir, Ph.D., Laboratory of Translational Genomics, for her proposal “High-resolution epigenetic annotation of susceptibility loci from breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancer genome-wide association studies”;  Jonine D. Figueroa, Ph.D., M.P.H., Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch (HREB), for “Breast cancer risk factors and markers of proliferation, apoptosis, and hormone receptor expression in normal breast biopsies”; and Nicolas Wentzensen, M.D., Ph.D. (HREB), for his project on “Methylation profiling of ovarian and endometrial cancers: Development of a marker panel for studies of etiologic heterogeneity and early detection.”

Proposals were reviewed by members of the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors and senior DCEG scientists and were judged on their potential for significant scientific and public health impact, innovation, interdisciplinary nature, ability to achieve the objectives within the proposed time frame and resources, and relevance to the mission of the Division and Institute.