UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry Graduate Students Carly Ferguson, Alex Jacobitz, and Alexander Patananan have been selected as the 2013 Audree Fowler Fellows in Protein Science.
About Audree Fowler Fellows in Protein Science: Dr. Audree Fowler (pictured on top left) received her B.S. in chemistry from UCLA in 1956 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1963, when that field was almost exclusively male. She served as a NIH postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and in UCLA’s Department of Biological Chemistry before becoming a research biological chemist in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Here on the Westwood campus Dr. Fowler forged a distinguished research career that spans the sciences and includes more than 80 publications. She also built strong connections with the Molecular Biology Institute, the UCLA Protein Microsequencing Facility (where she served as director for 15 years), the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry.
“The sciences gave me a great life”, she explained. “Now I want to help others have access to the same opportunities I enjoyed.” In 2008, an endowment from Dr. Fowler established the Audree Fowler Fellows in Protein Science for Ph.D. students in the Molecular Biology Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program, Biological Chemistry, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
2013 Audree Fowler Fellows in Protein Science Recipients
Carly Ferguson, Alex Jacobitz, Alexander Patananan
Carly Ferguson (Prof. Joseph Loo Group)
Carly is a fifth year biochemistry graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Loo. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Florida. Her undergraduate thesis work was in the fields of genetics and evolution. She spent a summer at the AMOLF FOM Institute in Amsterdam studying imaging mass spectrometry of glycoproteins.
Alex Jacobitz (Prof. Robert Clubb Group)
Alex received a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from California State University Channel Islands in 2009, where he did research with Dr. Blake Gillespie to understand the structural basis of thermostability in proteins involved in chemotaxis from Thermotoga maritima. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Clubb.
Alexander Patananan (Prof. Steve Clarke Group)
Alexander Patananan is a native Californian. He attended UCLA for his Bachelors of Science degree and majored in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics. At UCLA, Alexander conducted drosophila genetics research under the guidance of Drs. Utpal Banerjee and John M. Olson. After graduating in 2008, he was accepted into the doctoral studies program in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCLA, and joined the Dr. Steven Clarke laboratory in the spring of 2009. In his free time, Alexander serves as a graduate student mentor for the Undergraduate Research Center, and enjoys running and photography.
You can find more information about the students and their research by visiting the UCLA MBI announcement page. Thank you to MBI for the information in this story.
