The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing ground-breaking applied science with real-world benefits for all humanity, has announced the 2019 recipients of the prestigious Hertz Fellowship, which include Jacqueline Turner who made important advances at the International Biorepository and Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado Denver.
Celebrating 60 years in 2017, the Hertz Fellowship is one of the most exclusive fellowship programs in the world. The 1,200 Hertz Fellows are the leaders, shapers and disruptors of American science, engineering and mathematics. The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation is the legacy of John Hertz, a Hungarian immigrant who made his fortune by capitalizing on the entrepreneurship prospects in the budding automotive industry. He believed that innovative and entrepreneurial solutions were vital to the strength, security and prosperity of our nation, and began the Foundation to support exceptionally talented students expected to have the greatest impact on the world’s problems.
Jacqueline Turner (University of Colorado Denver; Medical Science) — Driven by a desire to improve cancer patient care, Turner is training to become a clinician scientist at the CU Denver School of Medicine and aspires to translate laboratory research results directly into clinical practice. As an undergraduate at the International Biorepository and Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado Denver, her work on gene rearrangements in tumor cells already has helped introduce basic scientific research into the clinical setting, starting with the successful treatment of a stage IV melanoma patient. Turner then identified novel therapies for three other stage IV melanoma patients. Her goal is to develop methods that will impact the treatment and prevention of tumor formation.
Drawing from nine of the country’s most prestigious research universities, 11 young researchers were selected from a pool of more than 840 applicants to receive up to five years of academic support valued at up to $250,000. Along with the funding, Fellows will also be free of many constraints typical of other fellowships, providing them the freedom to pursue innovative research wherever it may lead.
“It is increasingly challenging to get funding for truly creative scientific research, but it is even more so for young researchers to pursue their own ideas.” … “I am very gratified that these terrific new Hertz Fellows will now be able to focus on the research questions they find most compelling in their fields.” – David Galas, Chairman of the Hertz Foundation’s Board of Directors and a senior investigator at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute
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