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The Office of Graduate Education at the UNC School of Medicine will recognize 10 faculty members from across UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus as Excellence in Basic Science Mentoring Award winners at a January 15 ceremony with a keynote address.


The Office of Graduate Education at the UNC School of Medicine has named 10 recipients of the Excellence in Basic Science Mentoring Awards, a nod to the 10 years that UNC-Chapel Hill’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program has been in existence. These faculty mentors are from departments within the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.

The awardees are:

Gary Pielak, PhD, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biophysics

Jeff Sekelsky, PhD, professor of biology

Dorothy Erie, professor of chemistry

Brian Strahl, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics, Smithies Investigator

Joan Taylor, PhD, professor of pathology and lab medicine

Chris Mack, PhD, professor of pathology and lab medicine

Henrik Dohlman, PhD, Sanford Steelman Distinguished Professor and Chair of Pharmacology

Kathleen Caron, PhD, professor and chair of cell biology and physiology

Ben Major, PhD, associate professor of cell biology and physiology

Matt Redinbo, PhD, William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Genomics

All of these faculty mentors are members of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Taylor is associate director of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute, and Caron and Mack are McAllister members.

These awardees will be recognized Tuesday, January 15th at 2 pm in room 1131 in the Bioinformatics Building. A keynote address will be given by Anna Sokac, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Sokac is a Master Facilitator for the National Research Mentoring Network’s (NRMN) Entering Mentoring curriculum, and she has implemented a campus-wide mentor training program at Baylor. The working title of her talk is “The good mentor’s power to tackle our most urgent scientific challenges.”