CCR Connections

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Andre Nussenzweig, Ph.D.
Nussenzweig has been appointed Chief of CCR’s newly formed Laboratory of Genome Integrity. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University. He completed his postdoctoral training at the École normale supérieure in Paris and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center prior to joining CCR’s Experimental Immunology Branch. During his 13-year career at NCI, he has made major contributions to our understanding of how the integrity of the genome is maintained. He has made a series of incisive discoveries in the fields of DNA repair and oncogenesis, including: establishing that the major non-homologous end-joining pathway acts as a genomic “caretaker” that protects against cancer; determining the etiology of chromosomal translocations associated with lymphomas; finding that a core histone, the basic unit utilized by cells to compact their genomes, can act as a tumor suppressor; and discovering pathways that prevent genetic damage from being passed on from one generation to the next.

Shiv Grewal, Ph.D.
Grewal has been named Chief of CCR’s Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he studied as a prestigious Cambridge-Nehru Scholar. He then came to NCI-Frederick in 1992 as a Postdoctoral Fellow and extended his research on the mechanisms that enable epigenetic control of gene expression and development. In 1998, Grewal chose to join the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a faculty member and rose to Associate Professor before returning to NCI in 2003 as a Senior Investigator in CCR’s Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology where he led the Chromosome Biology Section. His work to understand the epigenetic control of chromosome structures continues. Science magazine cited his discovery of a connection between RNAi and heterochromatin formation as a “Breakthrough of the Year 2002.” His focus area is critically important to cancer research because it addresses important questions about epigenetic mechanisms that are essential for the maintenance of genomic integrity. And defects in genomic integrity can lead to cancer and other human diseases.

Frederic Barr, M.D., Ph.D.
Barr joins CCR’s Laboratory of Pathology as the Deputy Laboratory Chief. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine. He completed residency training in anatomic pathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and performed postdoctoral research in the Division of Human Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Before coming to the NIH, Barr was a faculty member in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His research interest is molecular genetics of cancer with a focus on recurrent chromosomal alterations in sarcomas.

Eric Batchelor, Ph.D.
Batchelor joins CCR’s Laboratory of Pathology as an NIH Earl Stadtman Investigator. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied two-component signal transduction in bacteria in the laboratory of Mark Goulian. Batchelor then pursued postdoctoral training in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He studied p53’s dynamic response to DNA damage in the laboratory of Galit Lahav. Batchelor’s research focuses on quantitatively understanding the regulation and function of mammalian stress responses and on understanding the tumor suppressor protein p53.

Heidi Kong, M.D.
Kong is now a tenure-track investigator in CCR’s Dermatology Branch. She received her M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine. She then completed her dermatology residency at Duke University. After completing a clinical research fellowship in the Dermatology Branch and the Duke-NIH Masters Program in Clinical Research, Kong became an Assistant Clinical Investigator and worked with collaborators to establish the NIH Intramural Skin Microbiome Consortium. Her research focuses on the skin microbiome in health and in skin diseases with the goal of expanding understanding of host-microbe interactions.

Jadranka Loncarek, Ph.D.
Loncarek joins CCR’s Laboratory of Protein Dynamics and Signaling as an NIH Earl Stadtman Investigator. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Sciences at Zagreb University, Croatia, in cell and molecular biology. She completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Alexey Khodjakov at Wadsworth Center, Albany, New York, where she studied the mechanisms of centriole duplication and mitotic spindle formation. Her current research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanism of centrosome biogenesis and its function, with particular attention on numerical control of centrosome formation in nontransformed and cancerous human cells.

Claudia M. Palena, Ph.D.
Palena is now a tenure-track investigator in CCR’s Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology. She received her Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the National University of Rosario, Argentina. She subsequently joined the NIH as a Postdoctoral Fellow and served as a Staff Scientist in the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology. Palena’s current research is focused on the development of novel immunotherapeutic approaches aimed at targeting critical events in tumor progression with the ultimate goal of designing vaccine platforms and combinatorial therapies for the prevention and/or treatment of metastases in human cancer.

John (Jay) Schneekloth, Jr., Ph.D.
Schneekloth joins CCR’s Chemical Biology Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University where he studied natural product total synthesis and chemical biology relating to the ubiquitin- proteasome pathway with Craig Crews. He then pursued an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Erik Sorensen at Princeton University, where he worked on the development of a new multicomponent reaction and the synthesis of analgesic natural products. He returned to Yale where he worked as a medicinal chemist at the Yale Small Molecule Discovery Center. Schneekloth’s research involves using synthetic chemistry and screening techniques to develop small molecule probes of signal transduction pathways, specifically related to ubiquitin-like protein signaling.