Meet Our Curci Scholars

The Curci Foundation has supported basic research in the life sciences for more than a decade. In 2021, they selected three universities — UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington — to receive $1.78 million each for a two-year pilot program to support an inaugural cohort of six PhD students in the biomedical sciences. Their goal is to increase representation of women and international students in the biomedical, scientific training environment.  In 2022, the program was expanded to an additional three universities.  Our department is currently home to two Curci Scholars.

Risako Gen is a first year Biochemistry student from Japan. After graduating college in Massachusetts, she joined the UW Biochemistry Ph.D. program to continue her academic path and pursue her passion for research. She has an interest in the field of therapeutics and is excited to do research that will contribute to this field. She rotated in Liangcai Gu’s lab this fall, working on developing protein biosensors to detect neuropeptides within brain tissue. In Winter Quarter, Risako will rotate in David Veesler’s lab , where she will focus on how a nonstructural protein of SARS-CoV-2 interacts with the host ribosome to inhibit the innate immune response.

 

Sara Gonske was born and raised in Barron, Wisconsin. In 2017, she earned a B.S. in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Currently, Sara is a second-year biochemistry graduate student in Dr. Thelma Escobar’s lab. She is interested in how chromatin states are formed and contribute to epigenetic memory during cell division. More specifically, Sara is studying the structure-guided mechanism of NPM1, a histone chaperone that participates in maintaining facultative heterochromatin domains during DNA replication.