May 2022
Adrianna De La Torre & Kristi Miller receive
2021 E. Lucile Smith Award for Scientific Excellence in Biochemistry
The Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology is pleased to announce Adrianna De La Torre and Kristi Miller as the recipients of the 2021 E. Lucile Smith Award for Scientific Excellence in Biochemistry. The Smith Awards honor the ground-breaking career of Dr. E. Lucile Smith, the first woman to attain the rank of Professor of Biochemistry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Adrianna and Kristi received this award in recognition of their exceptional research accomplishments during the past year. The Dr. E. Lucile Smith awards are funded by the generosity of Dr. Smith’s nephew Gray Parker, his wife Mary Kay, and the Booth-Bricker Fund.

Adrianna is being recognized for her accomplishments as a Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Dr. Ta Yuan Chang. Adrianna successfully defended in April 2022 and will formally graduate with her Ph.D. in June. Adrianna’s research focuses on developing nanoparticles encapsulating acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferase (ACAT) inhibitors. ACAT is involved with cholesterol regulation and homeostasis by converting free cholesterol into cholesteryl esters for storage in the cell. Previous studies from the Chang lab and others have shown the benefits of inhibiting ACAT in atherosclerosis, neurodegenerative diseases, and certain forms of cancer. ACAT inhibitors are readily available, however, methods to encapsulate and deliver ACAT inhibitors by nanoparticles have not been reported. In her most recent work, Adrianna developed and characterized a stealth lipid-based nanoparticle system to facilitate the delivery of a potent ACAT inhibitor. This work was recently published in J Neurosci Methods.

Kristi is being recognized for her accomplishments as a postdoctoral research scientist in the lab of Dr. James Moseley. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology from The Ohio State University and joined the Moseley Lab in June 2019. Kristi’s initial project in the Moseley lab revealed a new mechanism of t-SNARE regulation in fission yeast. Combining quantitative microscopy and genetic approaches, Kristi and co-authors found that clustering of a conserved t-SNARE Psy1 (S. pombe Syntaxin) into multi-protein nodes at non-growing fission yeast cell sides restricts exocytosis to growing cell tips. Collectively, this work identifies a new mechanism that contributes to spatial control of polarized cell growth. This work was published in Molecular Biology of the Cell in 2021. Kristi’s current research focuses on how cells control their size.