Fromme

Chris Fromme ‘99, an associate professor in the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology and the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The fellowship will support his sabbatical leave from June to December this year as a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, one of the colleges of University of Cambridge (U.K.), where he will conduct research at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Fromme’s research centers on the Golgi complex, the cell’s control center for distributing proteins to organelles within the cell as well as beyond the cell’s membranes for use in biological pathways. His research employs many different techniques from the fields of biochemistry, cell biology, genetics and structural biology to decipher how regulatory proteins at the Golgi complex make molecular decisions. His findings have included atomic pictures of DNA repair enzymes removing damage from DNA, the mechanism underlying an inherited human genetic disorder, and a network of signals that controls how cells sort and organize their contents.

While in Cambridge, “I will be using state-of-the-art structural biology techniques to investigate the atomic structure of the Golgi regulatory proteins that we study in my lab,” Fromme said.

Fromme received his doctorate in biochemistry in 2004 from Harvard University. He joined Cornell’s faculty in 2008. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, and his laboratory is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

In its 92nd annual award, the foundation granted fellowships to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada. Appointed on the basis of “prior achievement and exceptional promise,” successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants, according to the foundation’s website.