IGI Postdocs Cara Brook and Jenny Hamilton Recognized for Excellence in Science

This week, two IGI postdocs, Cara Brook and Jenny Hamilton, were recognized for their excellent achievements in scientific research.

Cara Brook, a postdoc in the Glaunsinger lab, was named a 2020 L’Oreal For Women in Science fellow. This award comes with $60,000 of research support funding. Cara joined the IGI in spring 2020 as one of our COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Awardees, studying the spread of COVID-19 in Madagascar using advanced genome sequencing techniques. She is particularly interested in estimating when COVID-19 was introduced to Madagascar, and the patterns of contagion that can inform public health interventions. Cara is also working on other projects studying wild bats and the diseases they carry. Learn more >

Also this week, Jenny Hamilton, a postdoc in the Doudna lab, was named a 2020 STAT Wunderkind. Jenny played a critical role in getting the IGI COVID-19 diagnostic lab running, serving as the technical co-lead for the pop-up testing lab both in the early, all-manual iteration of the lab, and through the transition to using robotics. More recently, she’s helped create the lab’s protocol for pooling samples to increase asymptomatic screening. Jenny is also doing research on delivery of therapeutic CRISPR genome-editing tools into human cells, focusing on using viruses to ferry them in. Learn more >

Congratulations to Cara and Jenny for these prestigious awards!

By Hope Henderson

Hope Henderson holds a B.A. in Biology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Molecular & Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the IGI in 2019 to work in science communication. In addition to serving as IGI’s main writer, she plans content strategy and manages IGI’s social media, illustration, and translation.