Congratulations to one of our Cellular and Structural Biology graduate program alumni, Nourhan Abdelfattah, Ph.D. who has just received a two-year Horizon Award (total costs, ~$250,000) from the Department of Defense FY19 Peer Reviewed Cancer Research Program! Nour is currently in the second year of postdoctoral training in the Department of Neurosurgery at The Houston Methodist Research Institute with Dr. Kyuson Yun (who is also a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York).

Nour, who was a student in the IMGP Cancer Biology track in Dr. Manjeet Rao’s lab, graduated with her Ph.D. degree in May 2018. Nour excelled while in our program, receiving multiple honors including: (i) the department’s David Carrillo Memorial Fellowship Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies in 2015; (ii) a Greehey Foundation Graduate Fellowship Award in Children’s Health in 2014 (that was renewed for another year in 2015); and (iii) a prestigious and competitive “Faculty of the Future” Predoctoral Fellowship Award from the Schlumberger Foundation in 2016 that was also renewed for another year in 2017. Nour served as graduate student representative on our COGS for the 2016/17 academic year and she was our program’s nominee for the 2017 GSBS Presidential Ambassador Scholarship Award nominee as well as the 2018 Guarino Award. In addition, Nour was selected as Cell Systems & Anatomy’s 2018 Barbara Bowman Student of the Year, an award that she received at the departmental annual retreat last year.

Nour published the bulk of her dissertation research from the Rao lab as a 1^st author paper in Nature Communication in fall 2018. She was also co-author on multiple papers from the Rao lab including one in Science Advances.

Congratulations also to her mentor, Manjeet Rao, Ph.D.!

This article was written by Kay Oyajobi, Ph.D., deputy chair for education & training in the Department of Cell Systems and Biology. 

Interested in connecting with Nourhan? Find her on gsbsalumni.com.