Honors for Morrison, Villegas and Brennan

Morrison, Villegas among new Gilliam fellows

Evan Morrison

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or HHMI, announced in July its new class of fellows in the Gilliam Program, which supports doctoral students and their advisers in an effort "to ensure that students from groups historically excluded from and underrepresented in science are prepared to assume leadership roles in science and science education." Two of the 50 new fellows are graduate student members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Alejandra Villegas

Evan Morrison is a Ph.D. student in the lab of Olivia Rissland at the University of Colorado–Anschutz Medical Campus. The lab studies molecular mechanisms that regulate mRNA stability, including how translation elongation can affect mRNA decay, how maternal gene products are removed in the zygote, and the structure of mRNA decay machinery in diverse model organisms, for example the human pathogen giardia, which has RNA processing systems with limited similarity to yeast and humans.

Alejandra Villegas, of the University of Georgia, works with advisor Vasant Muralidharan on understanding the proteins involved in escape from red blood cells by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. She focuses on a glycosyltransferase in collaboration with labs in the complex carbohydrate research center. Villegas is also the president of the University of Georgia's Cellular Biology Graduate Student Association and works with the student science policy group.

The Gilliam fellowships provide up to $50,000 annually to adviser–student pairs for three years. The next round of applications will open in October 2021 for a September 2022 start date.