December 1, 2005

Faculty honors

Lester Binder, professor of cell and molecular biology, has been named Abbott Labs-Duane and Susan Burnham Research Professor in Genetic and Molecular Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Binder focuses his research on basic cellular and molecular mechanisms as the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s disease. His research is supported by four grants from the National Institutes of Health, including a 10-year MERIT Award received in 1997.

His laboratory studies the role of microtubule-associated proteins in the normal and diseased nervous system. Most of his work focuses on tau, a protein thought to stabilize axonal microtubules. The medical community is interested in tau because it is the major protein species in the paired helical filaments, which comprise the fibrillar pathologies found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Averill Curdy, who this year began teaching poetry as a lecturer in English, has been awarded the 2005 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. The $10,000 award is given annually to six women writers in the early stages of their careers.

Curdy began teaching poetry in her mid-thirties after a career at Microsoft and after running her own communications business in Seattle. She is co-editor of the soon-to-be-published “Longman Anthology of Poetry.”

Curdy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Slate, Western Humanities Review, Poetry and Prairie Schooner. She will use her award to support research and writing of a sequence of lyric poems tentatively titled “Ovid in America.”

Charles V. Clevenger, M.D., professor of pathology, has been named the Diana, Princess of Wales Professor of Cancer Research at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Clevenger’s early research efforts focused on the characterization of the role of proliferation-associated nuclear antigen p105 in lymphocytes. This led to the discovery that interleukin-2 drives prolactin into the nucleus of lymphocytes and plays a role in cell proliferation.

He has continued to explore the role of prolactin and prolactin receptors in the development of breast cancer. His current efforts focus on the complex signaling mechanisms that influence prolactin signaling, prolactin receptor isoforms and the prolactin and prolactin receptor-associated proteins.

Dennis West, professor of dermatology, has been named the first Vincent W. Foglia Family Research Professor in Dermatology at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

The professorship was established with a gift from Vincent and Patricia Foglia.

West is the director of the dermatopharmacology program. He is a leading expert in the area of percutaneous absorption and is also a consultant on medications used to treat dermatologic disorders, both systemically and topically.

In addition to teaching at Northwestern, West is a professor for the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a chair for Administrative Review for the Institutional Review Board for the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at Northwestern and a lecturer for the M.D./Ph.D. program in the department of dermatology at the University of Catania, Italy.