MCB faculty Amanda Whipple has received an R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the NIH. The award provides five years of funding to promising early career PIs, with the goal of ensuring recipients’ stability and flexibility as their labs branch out in pursuit of new research questions.
“Receiving a five-year award from the NIH feels like a special milestone for a new lab, so this award is particularly significant,” Whipple says. “The R35 funding mechanism is great because the award is not tied to specific aims, rather it provides broad funding for new ideas that arise during our studies.This will allow us to ‘follow the science’ wherever it leads.”
Whipple’s research investigates genomic imprinting, a process that results in only one of the two parental gene copies to be expressed in offspring. The R35 award will enable the lab to look into the cellular mechanisms regulating imprinted gene expression as well as the biological functions of imprinted genes in the brain.
“We are following up on some recent work in which we’ve found that the DNA inherited from one’s mother is folded differently than the DNA inherited from one’s father within a particular imprinted region of the genome,” Whipple says. “We are now extending this work to comprehensively quantify differences in the 3D folding of the maternal and paternal alleles across imprinted domains.”
The Whipple Lab is currently recruiting people with expertise in genomics, neuroscience, and computational biology.
Congratulations to Professor Whipple and her lab!
