Congratulations to one of our CSA graduate students Pooja Yadav, M.S. (Cancer Biology discipline) who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on June 25!

Since joining the IBMS Program, Pooja has had many distinctions. She was the recipient of the David Carillo Memorial Fellowship Award in 2016 and the Rennels Memorial Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies in 2017, both annual awards given by the CSA department. In addition, she placed 1st in the poster competition held during the Department of Pediatric Research day in 2017. Pooja was also recipient of two separate competitive travel awards from the GCCRI and the GSBS to attend and present her work at the RNA Institute’s 6th Annual RNA Symposium on “The Language of RNA in Disease and Development” held at University at Albany (State University of New York) in January 2018. For her podium presentation at this meeting, Pooja received the award for the best overall research presentation in the Trainee Presentation Session.

Finally, Pooja, who is mentored by Manjeet Rao, was selected as the institution’s sole applicant in 2019 for a prestigious NIH/NCI F99/K00 award and she had been supported as a predoctoral trainee on the CPRIT-funded training grant since 2018.

She plans to stay on in the Rao lab for a short postdoc while working to see her dissertation research published in a first author paper. Thereafter Pooja, who is already co-author on several publications including one in Nature Communications and another in Science Advances, will be pursuing a second postdoc in gene regulation at some other institution.

Congratulations also to Manjeet!

This article was written by Dr. Kay Oyajobi, the CSA Deputy Chair for Education & Training. 

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