UP student wins 2015 Sanger Institute Prize Competition in UK
LIEZEL Tamon, a 4th-year thesis student of the Disease Molecular Biology and Epigenetics Laboratory (DMBEL) at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in UP Diliman, is this year’s winner of the prestigious Sanger Institute Prize Competition. The annual outreach competition sponsored by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, is open to undergraduates from low and middle income countries. The sole winner is offered a three-month internship with a research group at The Sanger and all travel, living and research expenses are covered by the award.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger institute is a world leader in Genomics Research and the internship provides the winner the opportunity to use cuttingedge experimental and genomics approaches to answering scientific questions. Tamon was chosen as this year’s winner in a two-stage selection process that involved writing a long scientific essay on a specified topic. Her winning essay on personalized medicine and human genetic variation touched on personalizing drug dosage, patient stratification according to genotype and identification of likely responders/non-responders to therapy, as well as the new research areas on non-coding RNA being pursued by their laboratory at NIMBB to further explain inter-individual and inter-ethnic variability in drug responses and pre-dispositions to disease.
Tamon is one of four summa cum laude candidates from DMBEL this year. The other three have also won for the university prestigious awards this academic year: Kenneth Anthony Roquid and Jose Lorenzo Ferrer were individual recipients of a SigmaAldrich Excellent Poster Award at the 2014 Annual Conference of the Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology in Gangnam, Seoul, Korea, while Martin Daniel Qui was first place winner of the Youth Science Forum during the Philippine Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s 2014 Annual Convention.