MCDB is pleased to announce that the first Blumenthal Fellowship in Down Syndrome has been awarded to Amber Sorenson, a PhD student in Robin Dowell's lab in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB) and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Blumenthal Fellowship will provide Amber a full year of support. Amber's project in the Dowell lab is a study of how the extra chromosome of people with trisomy 21 causes changes in the expression of genes on all chromosomes, not just genes located on chromosome 21.
The Blumenthal fellowship is available to MCDB graduate students or to graduate students pursuing their thesis research in a MCDB faculty member's lab. The fellowship fund was created by generous gifts from Joe Turner, an MCDB graduate and former CFO of Myogen Inc., Tom Blumenthal, former MCDB Chair and now Director of the Crnic Institute, Larry Gold, another former MCDB Chair and now Chairman of SomaLogic Inc., and the Anna and John J. Sie Foundation, among others.