CBSE NEWS

UC Santa Cruz awarded training grant from California stem cell institute

Thursday, September 15, 2005
Written by Tim Stephens

Differentiating mouse myoblast cells--muscle myotubule formation, Roland Nagel, UCSC

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) last week announced its first grant awards, including a $1.2 million training grant to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to establish a new training program in the systems biology of stem cells.

The UCSC program will be part of a larger CIRM Training Program in Stem Cell Research, a three-year, $12.5 million program to train predoctoral, postdoctoral, and clinical fellows at 16 institutions across the state. The UCSC grant will fund the training of three graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows each year.

Trainees will receive guidance from faculty mentors with a range of expertise in areas critical for advancing stem cell research. David Haussler will serve as program director along with 11 other faculty mentors from the departments of biomolecular engineering (Haussler, Josh Stuart, and Jim Kent), electrical engineering (Michael Isaacson), and molecular, cell, and developmental biology (Manny Ares, Andrew Chisholm, David Feldheim, Lindsay Hinck, Yishi Jin, Bill Sulllivan, John Tamkun, and Martha Zuniga).

The new program will draw from UCSC's strengths in computational genomics and basic biological research, providing fellows with a solid understanding of the biology of stem cells, the skills to use stem cells in their own research, and the ability to devise computational approaches and to integrate results from computational analyses into their own work. The program will underscore the value of stem cell research in developing therapies and cures for human disease.

"This program reflects our commitment to interdisciplinary research and education at the interface of science and engineering, and it takes advantage of the fact that many of our faculty regularly work across the divisional boundaries," Haussler said.