On April 8, 2004, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will once again recognize the outstanding and important contributions of its graduate and medical students, postdoctoral fellows and clinical residents, who over the last year have answered scientific questions that have lingered for decades and even centuries.

The 27th Annual Young Investigators' Day celebration will begin at 4 p.m. in Mountcastle Auditorium in the Preclinical Teaching Building, East Baltimore. As part of the celebration, 10 doctoral candidates and six fellows and residents will receive Young Investigators' Day Awards and present their winning research. Afterward, a reception will honor all of the institution's young investigators.

"This gives all of us at Hopkins a chance to celebrate what we have here -- a large number of outstanding mentors, hard-working trainees who place a lot of importance on the quality of their research, and great interactions," says Sarah White, a Ph.D. candidate in the Cellular and Molecular Medicine graduate program who will receive this year's Martin and Carol Macht Award.

This year's award recipients, like those from previous years, exhibit unusually independent thought and creativity in pursuing their research, frequently taking on projects their own mentors think may be too ambitious for the typical five-year graduate student stint or two- to four-year postdoc position.

For example, immunology graduate student Hao Jiang had to develop a cell-free experimental system before he could tackle the real question at hand -- how the immune system learns to recognize such a wide variety of invaders. For previous students and post-docs, the details had been unreachable.

With the system he developed, however, Jiang uncovered the f
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Contact: Joanna Downer
jdowner1@jhmi.edu
410-614-5105
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
6-Apr-2004