Center fellow Dr. Theresa Loveless Received a NIH Diversity Award – MOSAIC K99/R00

Congratulations to the CMCF center fellow, Dr. Theresa Loveless, a postdoctoral researcher in Biomedical Engineering from Dr. Chang Liu’s lab, who received the NIH Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00). The diversity award will support Dr. Loveless’ DNA recorder to study drug resistance in breast cancer cells.

Loveless’ current work focuses on breast cancer cells. She seeks to understand how cells’ response to DNA-damaging chemotherapy drugs affects their development of resistance to the chemotherapy. This work is enabled by multidisciplinary collaborations at UCI: with her K99 co-mentor Qing Nie, professor of mathematics with a joint appointment in biomedical engineering and an expert in extracting biological insights from quantitative data; and with Olga Razorenova, molecular biology and biochemistry associate professor and an expert in tying changes in the molecular biology of cancer cells to their behavior. Ultimately, Loveless seeks to discover how the DNA damage response could be modulated to prevent cancer cells from becoming resistant to chemotherapy. 

Read full School of Engineering news article here.