HHMI fellowships to four international students

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Four graduate students at the School of Medicine are the recipients of international predoctoral fellowships awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Launched last year, the fellowships, each worth $43,000, are designed to help international students during their third to fifth years of graduate school in the United States. The four awardees and their projects are:

Fang-Chieh Chou, from Taiwan, is working towards atomic-accuracy structure modeling of protein-RNA complexes; advisor is Rhiju Das, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry.

Aditya Natarajan, from Canada, is working on incisive tests of the energetics within an enzyme active site, with the goal of advancing the fundamental understanding of the interplay of catalytic interactions and the surrounding enzyme environment; advisor is Daniel Herschlag, PhD, professor of biochemistry.

Anshul Rana, from India, is investigating interactions between bipolar disorder-associated proteins to identify disease-relevant signaling pathways; advisor is Ricardo Dolmetsch, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology.

Aysel Selimbeyoglu, from Turkey, is working on the optogenetic dissection of the neural circuitry underlying cognitive control; advisor is Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.