New Investigator Award 2010

The criteria for this award are as follows:

SRF members or those whose applications are under consideration, who are within 10 years of being awarded their PhD are eligible.  The recipient of this award is expected to present their paper as an oral presentation in the SRF/SSR New Investigator session at the SRF Annual Conference and the SRF/SSR Transatlantic Lecture at the SSR Annual Conference in the SAME year.

Please nominate colleagues that members feel are suitably qualified to be a recipient of this prestigious award which affords the winner the opportunity of showcasing their research at the annual meetings of both SSR and SRF.

Nominations need to be received by the SRF business office by 30 October 2010.

From 2004, recipients of the SRF New Investigator Award will be selected from a short-list of eligible candidates on the basis of their abstract submission to the Annual Conference, their curriculum vitae and letters of support from senior colleagues. Eligible candidates will have completed ten years (or less) of post-doctoral research.

SRF New Investigator – Suzannah Williams

Suzannah Williams obtained her Honours degree in Zoology from the University of Aberdeen (1995). As an undergraduate she was inspired to follow an academic career in reproductive biology by Dr Morley Hutchinson and Prof Paul Fowler. Dr Williams obtained her PhD investigating nutritional regulation of ovulation rate in sheep from the Royal Veterinary College, London supervised by Prof Rex Scaramuzzi. During her PhD, she worked with Dr Diarmuid O’Callaghan at University College Dublin and Prof Graeme Martin at the University of Western Australia. As a result, after her PhD, Dr Williams worked with Prof Martin funded by a Wain Postdoctoral Fellowship (1999) and a Lalor Foundation Fellowship (2000). In 2002, she joined Dr Pamela Stanley’s laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. In Dr Stanley’s laboratory, Dr Williams investigated the role of the oocyte on fertility using mice with oocyte-specific deletion of glycosyltransferases. Studies using these mice generating oocytes lacking specific glycans were used to refute long standing sperm-zona binding hypotheses and resulted in an invitation to speak at the 2007 Gordon Research Conference “Fertilization and the Activation of Development”. Further investigation has revealed novel roles for the oocyte in the regulation of follicle function, ovulation rate and ovarian failure. Dr Williams joined the University of Oxford as a Lecturer in 2006 and has since established her own research programme with the central aim of investigating the mechanisms involved in the regulation of fertility by the oocyte. Dr Williams is funded by the MRC.

Previous winners of the SRF New Investigator Award are listed below:

• 2009 K Sales
• 2008 G Fitzharris
• 2007 Not Awarded
• 2006 B Robinson
• 2005 C Duncan
• 2004 LM Thurston