PhD Student in NYU Molecular Oncology and Immunology Training Program Receives Weintraub Graduate Student Award

Gabriel D. Victora, a May 2011 Ph.D. candidate in the NYU Molecular Oncology and Immunology Training Program, is among the twelve graduate students who were chosen from institutions throughout North America to receive the 2011 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award.

The Weintraub Graduate Student Award is sponsored by the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and recognizes outstanding graduate student work in biological sciences. Nominations for this award were solicited internationally and the winners were selected on the basis of the quality, originality and significance of their work. Gabriel Victora's PhD project investigates how germinal center dynamics are revealed by multiphoton microscopy with a photoactivatable fluorescent reporter. Results of this work were published in the November 12, 2010, edition of Cell as part of an NIH-funded collaboration between the Mike Dustin Lab and the Michel Nussenzweig Lab at Rockefeller University.

In January 2011, Gabriel Victora defended his Ph.D. thesis "B Cell Selection during T-Dependent Antibody Responses" under the mentorship of Mike Dustin, Ph.D., and Michel Nussenzweig, M.D., Ph.D., and his committee members Drs. Adrian Erlebacher (Committee Chair), Juan Lafaille, and Dan Littman. Originally from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Gabriel joined the Dustin lab as a graduate student through the Molecular Oncology and Immunology training program. He received his Master of Science in Immunology from the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 2006. Prior to that, he graduated from the Mannes College The New School for Music in New York with a Bachelor and a Master of Music degree.

As his mentor Dr. Mike Dustin notes, "what's interesting about Gabriel is that he was a concert pianist prior to starting his career as an immunologist in Brazil. He has amazing concentration and intensity in his approach to science, which he developed initially in music." Gabriel Victora is currently a joint student in the Michel Nussenzweig Lab at Rockefeller University and the Dustin Lab. Michel Nussenzweig, the Sherman Fairchild Professor at Rockefeller, is the son of Victor Nussenzweig, the famous immunologist and malaria researcher who came to the United States via Brazil and who is the Hermann M. Biggs Professor of Preventive Medicine in the NYU Department of Pathology.

The Weintraub Award recipients, all advanced students at or near the completion of their studies in the biological sciences, will participate in a scientific symposium on May 6 at the Hutchinson Center consisting of scientific presentations by the awardees. They will receive a certificate, travel expenses and an honorarium from the Weintraub and Groudine Fund, established to foster intellectual exchange through the promotion of programs for graduate students, fellows and visiting scholars.

The award was established in 2000 in honor of the late Harold M. Weintraub, Ph.D., a founding member of the Center's Basic Sciences Division, who in 1995 died from brain cancer at age 49. Weintraub was an international leader in the field of molecular biology; among his many contributions, he identified genes responsible for instructing cells to differentiate, or develop, into specific tissues such as muscle and bone. Read more about the Weintraub Award on the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center website.