Celebrating Funding Success for Early Stage Faculty

Sometimes at UNC we tend to be too modest about our research achievements and fail to recognize our outstanding faculty.

Over the past six months, multiple Assistant Professors in the department have been awarded grants to enable exploration of new fields of research and to support expansion of their programs.  Much of this success has been the result not only of strong preliminary data and well-constructed proposals, but also a focus on submitting the very best grant applications at the right time to the right agencies.  Congratulations to the all and in particular to the following Genetics faculty members for their recent awards:

	Hector Franco, PhD (Assistant Professor) was awarded a Department of Defense Research Program Breakthrough Award to study enhancer RNAs in triple negative breast cancer.  Additionally, Hector received a Susan G. Komen Career Catalyst grant to study crosstalk between estrogen receptor and inflammatory signaling in metastatic breast cancer.
	Yuliya Pylayeva-Gupta, PhD (Assistant Professor) was awarded a V Foundation for Cancer Research Award to study mechanisms of pancreatic cancer driven reprogramming of tumor promoting B lymphocytes.  Additionally, she received an R37 (MERIT) award from the National Cancer Institute to study the function of IL35+ cells in pancreatic cancer.
	Jesse Raab, PhD (Res Assistant Professor) was awarded a Career Development Award from the Department of Defense office of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs to explore mechanistic analysis of ARID mutations in hepatocellular carcinoma.
	Jason Stein, PhD (Assistant Professor) and Michael Love, Dr. rer. nat. (Assistant Professor) were awarded an R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to use integrative multi-omics causal inference to study molecular mechanisms leading to neuropsychiatric illness.
	Hyejung Won, PhD (Assistant Professor)was awarded a grant from the Simons Foundation to explore integrative analysis of common variation associated with autism spectrum disorder.  Additionally, Hyejung received a grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD)) to work on deciphering non-coding variation in schizophrenia.