Dr. Stacy Visser-Grieve - Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award

2012 April 11

Dr. Stacy Visser-Grieve is on a roll! She recently won a Fellowship Award from the Terry Fox Foundation -CIHR Training Program in Transdisciplinary Cancer Research and now she has won a prestigious Post-Doctoral Fellowship Award from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation of $142,500 over three years. These awards will allow her to pursue a project entitled "Identifying substrates of the calpain protease system and elucidating calpain's role in the cancer cell signalling network". This will be carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Greer in the Queen's Cancer Research Institute in the context of his Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded research project investigating calpain proteases as potential therapeutic targets in breast cancer. Stacy's project will include innovative protein structure-function and mass spectrometry-based proteomic methods to identify novel calpain targets, as well as transgenic mouse and cell models to elucidate the molecular roles of calpain in cancer cells. This work will be carried out in collaboration with Drs. Zongchao Jia and Steve Smith.

Stacy is a recent graduate of the Pathology and Molecular Medicine PhD program where she trained with Dr. Xiaolong Yang and published several outstanding papers on the LATS tumor suppressor. We are delighted that her outstanding potential as a cancer researcher has now been recognized by the CBCF, and that we have the opportunity to see her take the next steps in her development as a future independent breast cancer researcher.

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