Cheryl Lyn Walker, PhD
Cheryl Lyn Walker, PhD, Director of the Center for Precision Environmental Health and Professor in the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Medicine, and Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine, has been awarded an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This is the first NCI Outstanding Investigator Award to be given to a member of the Baylor College faculty.
NCI’s Outstanding Investigator Award supports researchers and provides long-term support to investigators and their work. The experiment supported by this award, “A New Target for Chromatin Remodeler Defects in Cancer,” is designed to explore new avenues for understanding the impact of chromatin remodeler defects in cancer.
“This R35 grant will allow us to focus our efforts on an exciting new discovery that represents a paradigm shift in how we look at chromatin remodeler defects in cancer,” said Dr. Walker, who also is a member of the NCI-designated Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor.
Dr. Walker’s lab is focusing on understanding ways in which environmental carcinogens reprogram the epigenome. As an offshoot of that research, the lab discovered a new function for the cell’s epigenetic machinery as well as a new way for defects in chromatin remodeler genes to drive cancer.
To support her project exploring chromatin remodeler defects in cancer, Dr. Walker’s grant will provide $600,000 in funding every year for 7 years. ■
