2 grad students win Young Investigator awards

Vesselina Cooke

5:02 p.m., May 17, 2005--UD graduate students Chad Blamey and Vesselina Cooke have been awarded the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis’ prestigious Young Investigator award.

Blamey’s protein research also will become a centerpiece at the society’s August conference because it has been designated a “hot topic.”

At an international conference in Sydney, Australia, Aug. 6-12, Blamey will be given 30 minutes to present his research on the crystalline structure of the protein CIB.

Most researchers are allotted 15 minutes, according to Ulhas P. Naik, associate professor of biological sciences at UD and the scientist who cloned the CIB protein Blamey is researching.

Blamey, a chemistry and biology interface student who works in Naik’s lab as well the lab of Brian J. Bahnson, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has been published in the Journal of Protein Science.

Chad Blamey

His work and the work of Young Investigator winner Vesselina Cooke will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Thrombosis and Hemostasis.

Cooke, a biological sciences graduate student who works in Naik’s lab, studied another protein Naik cloned. She proved the protein JAM-A is necessary for the formation of blood vessels that allow the growth of some tumors. By deleting JAM-A, Cooke was able to stop the formation of blood vessels certain tumors need to grow.

Cooke and Blamey will receive their awards and present their abstracts to an audience of 5,000 scientists when they are guests of the society at the August conference.

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson

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