Jennifer Garcia

Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology Jennifer Garcia has been awarded a $235,000 grant from the highly competitive Boettcher Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Award Program, which supports early career investigators in Colorado whose research has a direct impact on human health. The three-year grant will fund a study in baker’s yeast that investigates a new cellular process that discards RNA, a type of genetic material, to help cells survive stress. Garcia says some of the molecular players she has implicated in this novel decay pathway also have been shown to play a role in the fatal neurodegenerative disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. This suggests that lessons learned in her study could illuminate future clinical studies on ALS and other diseases.