BY ANGELA HOPP 

Amy Walker received her award at the Gordon Research Conference on Molecular and Cellular Biology of Lipids, which was held July 17 – 22 in Waterville Valley, N.H., and attended by JBC Associate Editors George Carman and Bill Smith. Photo courtesy of Joeseph Ferraro.

Harvard med school investigator recognized

Amy Walker, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, received the Journal of Biological Chemistry/Herbert Tabor Young Investigator Award for her studies of how metabolic pathways are linked to transcriptional programs and other aspects of cell biology.

“In my graduate and postdoctoral work, my primary interest was how transcriptional activators and the basal transcription machinery played roles in specific developmental processes,” Walker says.

Today, Walker and colleague Ander Näär focus on links between transcriptional regulation and lipid production. “In my lab, I use a combination of C. elegans and mammalian models to understand how regulation of lipid and 1-carbon metabolism is related to mechanisms of transcription factor function, such as the sterol regulatory elements binding proteins,” she says.  

A Mobile, Ala., native, Walker completed her undergraduate studies in microbiology at Auburn University, graduate studies in molecular microbiology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School.