Announcing the 2008 Dean’s Postdoctoral Prize Lecture awardee:  Sergio Peisajovich.

The Dean’s Postdoctoral Prize Lecture is awarded to a UCSF postdoctoral fellow each year. The purpose of the award is to recognize the outstanding creative and independent research efforts of postdoctoral scholars and to highlight the contributions that postdoctoral scholars make to the scientific community.  This year a second prize was also awarded (see below).  Sergio received a cash prize of $1000 and presented his research to the UCSF community on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008.

Sergio Peisajovich is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Wendell Lim, where he is currently studying how evolution re-wires complex signaling networks. He led the 2007 UCSF team that finished among the top-6 finalists in the Synthetic Biology Annual Competition (iGEM) organized by MIT. The goal of the iGEM competition, which in 2007 included 54 teams from all over the world, is to demonstrate that biology, although very complex, can be approached as an engineering discipline. The UCSF team led by Sergio included other 15 members, 6 of which were high school students from public schools in the Bay Area. The team chose to engineer cellular spatial localization, by taking the first steps towards the creation of a synthetic organelle.   Their work was recently featured in an article on the UCSF Today website and in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Novel compartments within eukaryotic cells would be ideal for isolating synthetic biology processes that involve fragile or toxic compounds, such as the cellular production of drugs or biofuels. 

Sergio represents the type of scientist that the Dean’s Prize Lecture was established to recognize.  He is “an outstanding postdoc” who was nominated and chosen for the Dean’s prize because of his commitment to research and because he sets a wonderful example of a scientist who contributes to the overall scientific community.  He was “a superb mentor to the team members” and “was the intellectual force behind the design of the synthetic organelle that was so well received at this year’s competition”.

This year a second prize was awarded to Andrew Ewald, a postdoctoral fellow in Zena Werb's lab, who is studying normal and neoplastic epithelial growth and invasion.  He combines 3D organotypic culture with confocal timelapse microscopy and pharmacologic and genetic interventions to determine the cell behavioral basis of epithelial growth and invasion and the regulation of cell behaviors by matrix metalloproteinases and Rac and Rho GTPases.  His movies reveal a novel mechanism for collective cell movement in which the epithelium grows through dramatic, reversible changes in proliferation, tissue architecture, and epithelial polarity, but without many of the classic features of cell motility such as forward oriented protrusive activity.  He is currently extending his work on normal morphogenesis to mouse models of breast cancer and to 3D organotypic cultures of primary human mammary epithelium.

Please direct inquiries to: Tracy L. Kress, Director, Office of Postdoctoral Education: kresst@medsch.ucsf.edu.