The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded Jin Yang, an assistant professor of pharmacology and pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, one of its first New Innovator Awards.
“It is a great honor and I feel fortunate to receive this support, especially at this time when the budget for NIH is very tight,” Jin said. “I truly appreciate this effort by the NIH director.”
The NIH acknowledged Jin, who will receive $1.5 million to support her work over five years, for her efforts and work on developing new and better approaches to studying how cancer cells metastasize to distant organs
“I started to be interested in biomedical research during high school and majored in biology in college in China,” she said. “I went to Duke for my graduate studies on cell cycle control and did postdoctoral research on tumor metastasis at Whitehead Institute in Boston.”
The NIH selected 29 recipients for the year 2007 and named them at a symposium this past fall.