The Ellison Medical Foundation partnered with AFAR to establish The Ellison Medical Foundation/AFAR Senior Postdoctoral Research Program which encourages and furthers the careers of postdoctoral fellows in the fundamental mechanisms of aging. The 2-year award of up to $100,000 is intended to provide significant support to permit M.D. and/or Ph.D. postdoctoral fellows to become established in the field of aging. Eligibility requires that these fellows will have at least three and not more than five years of prior postdoctoral training at the time of the award. Nearly $1 million has been committed by The Ellison Medical Foundation and the program continues. For more information, or to apply for this fellowship, see http://www.afar.org/ellison.html.

Recipients of the 2 year postdoctoral fellowships have been:

2004

Shermali Gunawardena, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, San Diego: "Axonal Transport and Neurodegenerative Disease: Is Perturbation in Vesicular Transport an Early Neuronal Dysfunction Pathway?"

Jeong Hyeon Park, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, The Rockefeller University: "The Roles of p53-interacting Chromatin Modifying Complexes in Human Cellular Aging"

Sarah Sagi, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, San Diego: "NSAID Modulation of y- and e-secretase"

2003

Haim Cohen, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School: "DNA Break Repair Controlled by SIRT1 Via the Deacetylation of Ku70 and Ku80"

Coleen T. Murphy, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, San Francisco: "Discovery and Analysis of C. elegans Lifespan Genes"

Marc F. Poitras, Ph.D., Research Associate, New York University School of Medicine: "Molecular Mechanisms of Tankurase1-induced Telomere Elongation"