2017 EMGS Young Scientist Award

Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society

Ever wonder what things in the environment do to your genes? We are the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society (EMGS), scientists in academia, government, and industry working to understand the genetic impacts of environmental exposures to promote human health. Through research we learn how genes in your body respond to the environment, how changes impact health and get passed to your children, and what we should do about this.

EMGS Young Scientist Award

EMGS is committed to helping young scientists - our future - make critical career transitions. At our Annual Meeting, we feature the EMGS Young Scientist Award, a chance for a new investigator embarking on an independent scientific career to give a plenary talk. Don't underestimate this honor! Face-to-face communication is one of the most important ways we learn, network, and make our science better.

You Pick the Winner

The EMGS Young Scientist Award is based on YOUR support and YOU will choose the winner from the candidates below! Contestants are screened by EMGS and invited to participate. All are just finishing their education and training or within 3 years of establishing an independent scientific career. This is a unique opportunity to participate in science and support a promising young scientist. After you have viewed all four videos you can click here to make your donation and cast your vote on the Indiegogo site.

Bogdan Fedeles: is a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the department of Biological Engineering and Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS), working in the lab of the CEHS director Dr. John Essigmann. The overarching goal of Dr. Fedeles’ research is to develop a unified framework for decoding the mutational records of cells, which would enable early cancer diagnosis, better exposure risk assessment and insights into disease etiology. To study mutagenesis, Dr. Fedeles utilizes a multidisciplinary approach, which includes biological chemistry to construct site-specific nucleic acid lesions and analogs, chemical and spectroscopic tools to study lesion biochemistry, and molecular biology and genetics experiments to assess the contribution of the genetic background to mutagenic outcomes. His current work investigates the mutagenic consequences of inflammation, and their contribution to the mutational burden observed in many inflammation-dependent human cancers. 

Natalie Saini: is currently a postdoctoral scientist in Dr. Dmitry Gordenin’s lab at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.  She is working towards establishing herself as an independent researcher in the near future.  Dr. Saini’s overarching research goal is to determine the range of genome-wide mutation loads and to identify the mutation signatures in the cells of healthy individuals to decipher environmental and genetic causes of genome instability.  She utilizes simple model organisms like yeast to understand how environmental agents affect DNA stability, and to apply this knowledge in more complex human research.  Her combinatorial approach enables her to answer key questions regarding the impact of environmental damage on mutagenesis in humans, resulting in important insights into how these factors affect human health.

Nikolai Chepelev: has developed strong and diverse expertise in toxicogenomics during postdoctoral training at the Genomics Laboratory of Health Canada, led by Dr. Carole Yauk. For this work, he has received three awards: two from Risk Assessment Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology (e.g., Best Published Paper Advancing the Science of Risk Assessment - 2015) and one from the Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis (EMM; New Investigator Best Paper Award - 2016). Nikolai showed how toxicogenomics can benefit health risk assessment by providing mechanistic information to explain neurotoxicity and carcinogenicity of benzo[a]pyrene as an example. He has recently joined Genetic Toxicology Laboratory at Health Canada (Leader - Dr. Paul White), where he is applying both traditional toxicity tests (bacterial mutagenicity and transgene mutation assays) and toxicogenomics. His goal is to develop high-throughput platform for in vitro Genetic Toxicity Assessment of chemicals that will rely on both traditional and emerging technologies. These efforts will facilitate our movement towards improved 21st century approaches in toxicology and health risk assessment.

Ludmil Alexandrov: completed his PhD in 2014 at the University of Cambridge and since then he has been an Oppenheimer Fellow in Theoretical Biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Ludmil’s research has been focused on understanding the mutational processes in human cancer through the use of mutational signatures. Ludmil developed the first comprehensive map of mutational signatures in human cancer and demonstrated the applicability of mutational signatures to cancer prevention and cancer treatment. Ludmil has more than 55 publications in well-respected scientific journals and he has won multiple awards for his work on mutational signatures, including:  listed as “30 brightest stars under the age of 30” by Forbes magazine; a Harold M. Weintraub Award by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center; Prize for Young Scientists in Genomics and Proteomics by Science magazine; Carcinogenesis Young Investigator Award by European Association for Cancer Research. Ludmil is currently one of six co-investigators leading the Mutographs of cancer, a project that seeks to understand the unknown cancer-causing factors across the globe by examining mutational signatures from 5,000 cancer patients from 17 countries across five continents.

The Rules

Anyone making a tax-deductible donation of any amount gets a vote (you may donate/vote as many times as you'd like). The candidate with the most votes wins. Up to $2,500 will go toward hosting the award winner's attendance at the meeting and a small honorarium. Additional contributions will support the travel of more young scientists to the annual meeting in Raleigh, NC.

Click here to make your donation and cast your vote on the Indiegogo site.