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| PhD student Jason Gorman featured in The Record |
May 13, 2011
Award-Winning Graduate Student Headed to NIH
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| Jason Gorman |
When Jason Gorman began his graduate work at Columbia, he thought
he was in over his head. Just six years later, Gorman, who receives his
doctorate this month in biological sciences, has been singled out by the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as one of the field’s most
outstanding graduate students.
Gorman’s work studying the proteins that repair broken DNA
molecules—some of it already published in peer-reviewed journals—has
earned him a position at the National Institutes of Health, where he
will begin postdoctoral work this summer researching HIV. Earlier this
month, he received the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, which
is given to a dozen students from all over the world by the Hutchinson
Center in Seattle.
Eric Greene,
an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at
Columbia, nominated Gorman for the award. “Jason is an absolutely
outstanding student and a gifted research scientist,” Greene says,
adding that he is “a cornerstone of my research group” and “the most
outstanding student I have encountered at Columbia.”
Yet in 2005, the 32-year-old Gorman wasn’t sure if he had what it
took. “I didn’t think I was going to end up making it through school,”
Gorman says. “I thought I’d give it a shot, but I thought I was in over
my head.”
He did one rotation in a lab on the Morningside Heights campus
working in atomic force microscopy before he wound up at the medical
center, in Greene’s lab, where he quickly felt at home.
“Being able to find the right place with the right work with the right people,” he says, was the key to his success.
Born in Lakeville, Mass., about 40 miles south of Boston, Gorman
attended Boston University with the intention of becoming a business
major. By the end of his sophomore year, however, he decided business
wasn’t the right fit and turned to biomedical engineering.
After receiving his bachelor of science degree, he spent two years
in San Francisco working as a software engineer for Gene Logic, a
biotech company, before moving back East to work as a technician in the
lab of Larry Shapiro, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia.
“When I started in Larry’s lab, I had basically no lab skills
whatsoever,” he says. “But I learned a lot there, and he encouraged me
to apply to grad school.”
During his graduate work, Gorman developed new techniques that
Greene says “will be the basis of much of the research done in my lab in
upcoming years,” including a method of producing DNA molecules with
specific kinds of damage. These damaged molecules are necessary for work
on DNA repair proteins, and will help determine how these proteins fix
broken DNA.
“When your cells divide, you have to replicate your DNA, so you
have to make an exact copy,” Gorman says. “You have machines in your
cell—proteins—that do this. They’re very good at making an exact copy,
but once in a while there’s a mistake. So I work on a system [in which a
repair protein] proofreads the copy to make sure that it is an exact
duplicate, because if you start making errors in your DNA, that’s what
can lead to diseases like cancer.”
At the NIH, his work will involve studying the structure of HIV and
disease-fighting antibodies. The work will “be useful in developing a
vaccine,” he says, because it will give researchers “an idea of the best
way for antibodies to attack HIV.”
—by John Uhl
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