The 2019 Pinn Scholars Are …

Congratulations to the 2019 Class of Pinn Scholars, who were named this December. Pinn Scholars are selected on the basis of their scientific expertise and contributions to the School of Medicine and to the greater research community. They are expected to develop a new project or direction in their research and share their results at an annual symposium.

The Scholars program is named in honor of Dr. Vivian Pinn who was a graduate of the UVA School of Medicine Class of 1967. She is a member of the National Academies of Science, a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past president of the National Medical Association.

The new Pinn Scholars and their projects are:

• Mazhar Adli, PhD
  Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
  “Identifying synthetic lethal partners of recurrent cancers mutations through massively parallel combinatorial double knockout genetic screens”
• Charles Farber, PhD
  Public Health Sciences/Center for Public Health Genomics
  “Developing a Predictive Gene Regulatory Network for Osteoporosis”
• Maria Luisa Sequeira-Lopez, MD
  Pediatrics
  “The fate of renin and renin progenitor cells in the bone marrow”
• Owen Pornillos, PhD
  Department of Molecular Physiology & Biological Physics
  “Molecular mechanisms of HIV-1 replication”

Previous Scholars include Alison Criss, PhD; Brant Isakson, PhD; Scott Keysell, MD, MPH; Gordon Laurie, PhD; Shayn Peirce-Cottler, PhD; Benjamin Purow, MD; Jeffrey Saucerman, PhD; and Jochen Zimmer, PhD.

The new scholars will be introduced at the Annual School of Medicine Symposium on Research Excellence on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019, from 2-5:30 PM in the Pinn Hall Conference Center Auditorium. The symposium will feature the work of the first two classes, as well as some recent faculty recruits.

Margaret A. Shupnik, PhD
Gerald D. Aurbach Professor of Endocrinology
Professor of Medicine
Senior Associate Dean for Research

Filed Under: Faculty, Operations