The (temporary) return of Tzachi

Tzachi Pilpel, who spent a happy* sabbatical in the Department from August ’08 to July ’09, is back for most of the summer to teach a Harvard Summer School course on Genomes and Systems Biology.  He’ll be around off and on until mid-August.  If you want to catch him, you can reach him at his normal e-mail address.

Welcome back, Tzachi!  We’ve missed you!

* for us as well as him.

Welcoming Kimberly Jackson

Meet Kimberly Jackson, Assistant Associate* Professor of Chemistry at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.  Kimberly is visiting the Department on sabbatical briefly this summer, and will be back for a longer period next summer.  Her visits are funded by the CDP Center.  She will be spending much of her time in the Lahav and Sorger labs, but hopefully will escape now and then to explore other labs.

Kimberly’s main focus is on prostate cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer in men.  She discovered that dibenzoylmethane, a component of licorice, has antineoplastic effects on prostate cancer cells, even after these cells have become resistant to androgen receptor antagonists. In her own lab at Spelman, she’s working on the mechanism of this effect.  She’s also interested in why African American men have a much higher incidence of prostate cancer than white men, and are more than twice as likely to die of the disease.  Alas, the answer is unlikely to be that they eat less licorice.

Welcome, Kimberly!

* She just got promoted!  Congratulations, Kimberly!