Achievement

Jeff Sander (IGERT associate, ISU) received the 2009 Zaffarano Prize for Graduate Research, a highly competitive award presented by ISU’s Provost to only one ISU Ph.D. student each year, in recognition of extraordinary research productivity (quality and quantity of published dissertation research). Jeff was the lead member of a multi-institutional interdisciplinary team bridging groups headed by D Dobbs (IGERT PI, ISU, Genetics, Development & Cell Biology), D Voytas (former ISU IGERT PI, now at Univ. Minnesota), L Miller (IGERT advisor, ISU, ComS), and J K Joung (Harvard), which developed highly effective methods for targeting zinc finger DNA binding proteins (ZFPs) to specific genomic sequences. Jeff both developed ZiFiT, a suite of algorithms and web-based software for ZFP design, and performed wet-lab experiments to validate predictions generated by his software. Jeff is co-author on 8 papers published in 08-09 (his dissertation work has resulted in 12 publications so far)!