Each spring, the graduate division at Einstein honors the research achievements of selected students during its annual Marmur Symposium. It’s a special event for the program that gives winners a chance to present their findings to faculty, students, and student applicants that have been accepted to Einstein’s Ph.D. program, but who have not yet decided on whether they will attend the College of Medicine.
The award is named after Dr. Julius Marmur, who has been credited with being a founding father of molecular biology. Just as relevant to the award that bears his name, Dr. Marmur was on the Einstein faculty for thirty-three years and was known for providing valuable guidance to graduate students tackling scientific problems. That tradition was carried on in the work of each of the labs this year’s winners came from―each one enthusiastically testified to the importance of the support and knowledge their mentors provided on the long road to becoming a Ph.D.
Following this year’s ceremony, we briefly spoke with all three winners about what they learned from their mentors and what wisdom they could now pass along to the new generation of graduate students.
The 2019 winners and mentors were:
- Jiahao Chen for “Myelodysplastic Syndromes Progression to Acute Myeloid Leukemia at the Stem Cell Level”. (Mentor: Ulrich Steidl, Ph.D., department of Cell Biology)
- Anthony Gizzi for “A naturally occurring antiviral ribonucleotide encoded by the human genome: A unifying mechanism for the antiviral effects of the radical SAM protein viperin” (Mentor: Steven Almo, Ph.D., department of Biochemistry)
- Penelope Ruiz for “Dissecting the functions of macroH2A1 in transcriptional regulation and the DNA damage response” (Mentor: Matthew Gamble, Ph.D., department of Molecular Pharmacology.)
Watch what the Marmur Award winners had to say about mentoring and lessons learned in the brief videos below.
