Cell scientist to watch – Christine Mayr

Before completing a PhD in immunology at the Humbolt University of Berlin, Christine Mayr received a medical degree from the Freie Universität Berlin. She received postdoctoral training with Michael Hallek at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. In 2005, Christine moved to the United States for a second postdoctoral position in the laboratory of David Bartel at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, funded by a fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She started her own group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2009, supported through funding from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, National Cancer Institute, the Starr Cancer Consortium, a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, a Kimmel Scholar Award and, most recently, a Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research. Her current research focuses on elucidating how proteins of the same sequence can have different functions due to differences in the untranslated regions of their mRNAs.