2007 ASBMB Award: Kate Quinlan

Institute for Neuromuscular Research, Children's Hospital at Westmead

Kate Quinlan undertook her BSc at the University of Sydney from 1997-2000. She spent her Honours year under the supervision of Professor Merlin Crossley in the School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences working on the mechanisms of action of the transcriptional co-repressor C-terminal binding protein (CtBP). Kate then moved to the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University, UK, for a year to work as a research assistant with Dr David Brown and to see the world. In Cambridge, she researched the prion protein PrP, which, when misfolded, is responsible for causing the fatal neurodegenerative diseases bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Kate then returned to Australia and to Professor Crossley's lab in 2002 to begin a PhD project and resume her research on CtBP. During her PhD, she identified and characterised an interaction between CtBP and the oncogene ZNF217 that implicated ZNF217 as a transcriptional regulator. This finding has provided information on how increased expression of ZNF217 may lead to aberrant gene expression and to the progression of cancer. Kate's PhD research was published in two Molecular and Cellular Biology papers in November 2006 and in a review on ZNF217 that has recently been accepted by BBA Reviews on Cancer. Following the completion of her PhD in March 2006, Kate took up a position as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Kathryn North's laboratory at the Institute for Neuromuscular Research, the Children's Hospital at Westmead. She is now researching the mechanism through which a common human null polymorphism in the ACTN3 gene leads to altered muscle function, muscle metabolism and athletic performance. Kate will use her ASBMB Fellowship to allow her to present her research findings at the 39th European Human Genetics Conference in Nice, France, in June.

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This page last modified: October 10, 2008.