2000 Grand Prize Winner
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 Alka Agrawal received the grand prize for her essay, "Transposition and Evolution of Antigen-Specific Immunity." Dr. Agrawal grew grew up in Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and earned her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan. Dr. Agrawal entered the pharmacology graduate school program at Yale University and began working in the laboratory of David Schatz, investigating the role of DNA repair proteins in V(D)J recombination. The development of an in vitro V(D)J cleavage system in the laboratory changed her focus and she began studying the cleavage mechanism as part of her doctoral research. Exposure to science policy at the National Academy of Sciences, and to science journalism through the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program, prompted Dr. Agrawal to pursue a career in science writing.
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Regional Winners |
Europe: Rafal Ciosk, for his essay "What Makes Sisters Inseparable" reporting his research on the mechanisms of sister chromatid cohesion and separation in budding yeast carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Kim Nasmyth at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Ciosk was born in Opole, Poland, and studied biology and genetics at the J.A.T.E. University in Szeged, Hungary. In 1995, he started his Ph.D. work in the laboratory of Dr. Kim Nasmyth and obtained his Ph.D. in genetics in January 1999. This year, he moved to Seattle, Washington, to study the germ cell precursors of Caenorhabditis elegans in the laboratory of Dr. James Priess at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
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All Other Countries: Avraham Yaron, for his essay "NF B Activation: The Death of a Protein on the Way to a Transcript's Birth" reporting his Ph.D. research on the activation of immune system transcription factors, carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Yinon Ben-Neriah at the Lautenberg Center of Immunology at Hadassah Medical School in Israel. Dr. Yaron was born in Jerusalem and pursued undergraduate studies in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1991 to 1993. He joined Dr. Ben-Neriah's laboratory in 1994 and set out to elucidate the activation pathway of the transcription factor, NFB, and the part played by its inhibitor, IB. In December 1999, he moved to the United States on an EMBO fellowship, joining the laboratory of Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is now working on the signaling mechanisms of axon guidance receptors.
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North America: The second North American regional winner was Douglas Heithoff, for his essay "When the Dam Breaks: Strategies of Bacterial Pathogens Exposed" based on his research in the laboratory of Michael J. Mahan at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Heithoff was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his bachelor's degree in biology in 1990. He joined the Mahan laboratory in 1993 where he identified Salmonella virulence factors required for host infection. Dr. Heithoff was awarded a Ph.D. in 1999 and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Mahan laboratory.
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Japan: Yuki Yamaguchi, for his essay "Transcript Elongation--Stimulation Is Not Enough" based on his Ph.D. research carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Hiroshi Handa at Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT). Dr. Yamaguchi was born in Chiba, Japan, and grew up in a suburb of Tokyo. He joined Dr. Handa's laboratory in 1994 as an undergraduate and studied various aspects of transcriptional regulation in higher eukaryotes. He then became interested in the regulation of RNA polymerase II during transcript elongation, and in his Ph.D. research identified a new class of proteins that directly control the polymerase's movement along the DNA. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, TIT, and is now a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at TIT's Frontier Collaborative Research Center.
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