2008-12-08
The Joanne Levy, MD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement is given to the current ASH Scholar with the highest scoring abstract for the ASH annual meeting as determined by the abstract review process. This year’s winner is Charles Mullighan, MD, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Mullighan is a hematologist whose interests include using genomic approaches to identify genetic alterations contributing to leukemogenesis and modeling of leukemogenic mutations in experimental systems. He received his undergraduate medical training and specialist training in hematology and hematopathology in Adelaide, Australia, and undertook doctoral work in immune response genetics at Oxford, UK.
Currently, Dr. Mullighan is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. James Downing, scientific director at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His work uses cutting-edge genomic approaches to identify the full complement of genomic abnormalities contributing to leukemogenesis, treatment resistance, and relapse, including profiling of copy number alterations, gene expression, and methylation, and high-throughput/next-generation sequencing approaches. His work also uses knockout and retroviral bone marrow transplant models of acute lymphoblastic leukemia to examine the role of individual mutations in leukemogenesis.
ASH is honored to offer this award, made possible by the Levy family to continue the legacy of their daughter Joanne, a past ASH Scholar Award recipient and distinguished Society member who passed away in 2004. Dr. Levy graduated from Harvard Medical School and went on to receive many prestigious awards and honors before receiving an ASH Junior Faculty Scholar Award in 2000 for research on the genetic regulation of iron metabolism at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Dr. Mullighan’s abstract, "Deletion of IKZF1 (Ikaros) Predicts Poor Outcome and Impaired Maturation in B-Progenitor Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia" will be presented today at 1:30 p.m., in the Yerba Buena Ballroom, Salon 9, at the San Francisco Marriott. The oral session is titled Acute Leukemias – DNA Copy Number Alterations.
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