Jane E. Raulston Award
Awards for the best poster presentation by a graduate student and by a post-doctoral fellow were established in honor of the memory of Dr. Jane E. Raulston. A cash prize is presented from the CBRS Treasury.
2023 Winners
|
Graduate Student
Cody Appa
|
Post-doctoral Fellow
Nina Nguyen
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Past Winners
|
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
2017
2019 |
Graduate Student
Jennifer Vanover
Lacey Taylor
Karin Aistleitner
Andrew Olive
Antonio Tedim Pedrosa
Ana Nogueria
Nathan Hatch |
Post-doctoral Fellow
Kena Swanson
Jorn Coers
Kena Swanson
Robert J. Bastidas
Brett Hanson
Mary Weber
Rodrigo Gonzalez |
About
Jane E. Raulston, Ph.D. (1967 - 2007)
A native of Tennessee, Jane attended nearby East Tennessee State University (1980-1984), where she double-majored in Music and Microbiology, and pursued doctoral studies at the University Tennessee-Knoxville (1988) on the envelope permeability resistance of Pseudomonas cystic fibrosis isolates to tobramycin. To expand her molecular biology techniques, she did a special year of Postdoctoral studies under Aziz Sancar in Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina
School of Medicine, and then continued in Microbiology in the Pris Wyrick laboratory, where Jane was introduced to Chlamydia and the hunt for adhesins. Jane’s initial findings were surprising – C. trachomatisHsp70 was detected in the envelope and potentially involved in adherence. Despite challenging current dogma that HSPs were localized to cytoplasm to chaperone protein folding, the impact of her paper was high and the literature became peppered with evidence for DnaK being the adhesin for several major bacterial pathogens. Jane was too critical a scientist to be swayed by the popularity of the moment or daunted by adversity. She quietly went back to the bench and, after a series of long, tedious and complex but elegant experiments, Jane proved that Hsp70 was actually not the adhesin but part of the chlamydial envelope adhesin complex, likely acting as a chaperone to present the real adhesin and using its ATPase function to help commandeer the entry process. This example speaks to Jane’s character as an honest and independent thinker with an impressive ability to devise and execute well-designed experiments to answer fundamental questions.
Dr. Raulston was invited to join the faculty in Microbiolgy at UNC as a Research Assistant Professor. Intrigued by the complexities of intracellular parasitism as well as the role of iron in microbial infection, Jane chose to launch her independent career in Chlamydia on the role of iron in chlamydial pathogenesis. Her first study was an important contribution to the field – that chlamydial growth and development was adversely affected by iron restriction and involved the up or down regulation of ~ 19 chlamydial proteins. This was followed by equally elegant, cutting-edge work identifying the master iron regulatory gene, dcrA, the first transcriptional repressor in Chlamydia. In 2000, she was recruited to return to her alma mater and the young J.H. Quillen College of Medicine, where she rose through the academic ranks to tenured Professor, won 4 major teaching awards, and continued her novel studies on iron-regulated chlamydial proteins. In addition, she was elected Chair of Division D for the American Society for Microbiology, continued her Editorial Board review service for Infection and Immunity, and served admirably on the Program Committee for CBRS #2 – Indianapolis.
Jane Raulston was a superb mentor to her students and Postdoctoral Fellows and an inspirational colleague; when you interacted with her and saw that warm, wonderful smile, she sincerely made you feel like the most important person in the world! To paraphrase a few lines from the British poet, David Harkins: “You can shed tears that she is gone, or you can smile because she has lived; you can close your eyes and pray she will come back, or you can open your eyes, see all she has left, smile and go on.”
--Priscilla Wyrick, Ph.D.
School of Medicine, and then continued in Microbiology in the Pris Wyrick laboratory, where Jane was introduced to Chlamydia and the hunt for adhesins. Jane’s initial findings were surprising – C. trachomatisHsp70 was detected in the envelope and potentially involved in adherence. Despite challenging current dogma that HSPs were localized to cytoplasm to chaperone protein folding, the impact of her paper was high and the literature became peppered with evidence for DnaK being the adhesin for several major bacterial pathogens. Jane was too critical a scientist to be swayed by the popularity of the moment or daunted by adversity. She quietly went back to the bench and, after a series of long, tedious and complex but elegant experiments, Jane proved that Hsp70 was actually not the adhesin but part of the chlamydial envelope adhesin complex, likely acting as a chaperone to present the real adhesin and using its ATPase function to help commandeer the entry process. This example speaks to Jane’s character as an honest and independent thinker with an impressive ability to devise and execute well-designed experiments to answer fundamental questions.
Dr. Raulston was invited to join the faculty in Microbiolgy at UNC as a Research Assistant Professor. Intrigued by the complexities of intracellular parasitism as well as the role of iron in microbial infection, Jane chose to launch her independent career in Chlamydia on the role of iron in chlamydial pathogenesis. Her first study was an important contribution to the field – that chlamydial growth and development was adversely affected by iron restriction and involved the up or down regulation of ~ 19 chlamydial proteins. This was followed by equally elegant, cutting-edge work identifying the master iron regulatory gene, dcrA, the first transcriptional repressor in Chlamydia. In 2000, she was recruited to return to her alma mater and the young J.H. Quillen College of Medicine, where she rose through the academic ranks to tenured Professor, won 4 major teaching awards, and continued her novel studies on iron-regulated chlamydial proteins. In addition, she was elected Chair of Division D for the American Society for Microbiology, continued her Editorial Board review service for Infection and Immunity, and served admirably on the Program Committee for CBRS #2 – Indianapolis.
Jane Raulston was a superb mentor to her students and Postdoctoral Fellows and an inspirational colleague; when you interacted with her and saw that warm, wonderful smile, she sincerely made you feel like the most important person in the world! To paraphrase a few lines from the British poet, David Harkins: “You can shed tears that she is gone, or you can smile because she has lived; you can close your eyes and pray she will come back, or you can open your eyes, see all she has left, smile and go on.”
--Priscilla Wyrick, Ph.D.
