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BCM graduate students win top awards year after year

by Ruth SoRelle

When Jun Zhang, PhD, won the 2004 Harold M. Weintraub Award for graduate students, leaders of the Baylor College of Medicine Graduate School for Biomedical Sciences were pleased but not surprised.

Since 2000, a BCM graduate student has been one of the winners of the national award given by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. To people like William Brinkley, PhD, dean of the graduate school, the awards are a sign that the schools and its educators are doing something right.

William Brinkley, PhD

“Our students are among the brightest in the nation,” said Brinkley. “We give them an opportunity to do good work and they make the most of it.”

Zhang, who came to Houston directly from her native China, found the Texas school very supportive.

“I had a lot of problems with many things,” she said. “I did not know the language well. I did not know anything about Houston. I had no car.”

Her fellow graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, school administrators and professors provided the help she needed, she said. They helped her and other students from out of the country a lot, she said.

“They invited us to restaurants, and gave us rides if we needed them,” she said. Most important, they helped the students get used to the BCM system and environment.

Exposing the students to different courses in different areas helped them get a view of what they could do, she said. “It was helpful for a first-year graduate student to learn about different kinds of research.”

When she got into the lab, her mentor David Moore, PhD, a professor of molecular and cell biology at BCM, helped her determine what she was going to do.

“He always brings us wonderful ideas,” said Zhang. “He is always excited about new ideas, and we are too. He is the kind of person who discusses sciences and ideas as well as how to perform experiments. David gave us a guide that allowed us to speak for ourselves and work independently.”

She is taking that independence on to her post-doctoral studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Other BCM graduate students who have won the award include: Sean E. McGuire, PhD, 2003; Thomas E. Lloyd, PhD, 2002; Jose M. Barra, PhD, 2001; and Sara Kaye Evans, PhD, 2000.

The award honors Harold Weintraub, PhD, a member of the basic sciences division of Fred Hutchinson from 1978 until his death from cancer in 1995 at the age of 49. As many as 15 graduate students from around the nation are selected on the basis of the quality, originality and significance of their work.

One of the products on which Zhang worked was a study of a tea called Yin Zhi Huang that promoted bilirubin clearance in mice. The research was described previously in From the Laboratories at Baylor College of Medicine.

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