Three Women Among the 2013 Searle Scholars

The Searle Scholars Program recently announced 15 winners of its 2013 awards. The program is reserved for young scholars at the assistant professor level in the chemical or biological sciences. Each winner receives an award of $300,000 to support their work over the next three years. The 15 winners were selected from 176 applicants representing 125 universities or research institutions.

The program is support by a trust established under the wills of John G. and Frances C. Searle. John Searle was president of the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Company, headquartered in Skokie, Illinois. The company has since been acquired by Pfizer Inc. Since its inception in 1980, 512 Searle Scholars collectively have received more than $106 million in grants.

This year, three of the 15 Searle Scholars are women.

Danelle Devenport is an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Her grant project is entitled, “Establishment of Long-Range Tissue Polarity in a Regenerative Epithelium.” Dr. Devenport is a graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. She holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Sophie Dumont is an assistant professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California San Francisco. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research project is entitled, “Mechanical Architecture of the Kinetochore-Microtubule Interface.”

Mary Red-Horse is an assistant professor of biology at Stanford University. She will use her grant money to study the molecular regulators of venous reprogramming during coronary development. Dr. Red-Horse holds a doctorate from the University of California San Francisco.