Clarkson University Professor Ginger Hunter Receives Graham Faculty Research Award
Ginger Hunter, an assistant professor of biology was awarded the John W. Graham Jr. Faculty Research Award during the University's spring 2024 commencement ceremony today.
The $1,500 research account is presented to "faculty members who have shown promise in engineering, business, liberal arts or scientific research."
Hunter received her bachelor of science degree in Biology from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University. She did her post-doctoral research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB) at University College London and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Her research takes genetic, cell biological, live imaging, and quantitative approaches to studying the development of biological patterns using the fruit fly model system, Drosophila Melanogaster.
She is also interested in how cell shape and movement affect cell-cell communication. Hunter is interested in how epithelial cells use long cellular extensions to communicate with distant neighboring cells in order to engage in lateral inhibition. Several cell types across many signaling paradigms in development have been observed to communicate using these kinds of extensions, but the mechanisms that drive their formation, behavior, and signaling properties are unknown.
She was recently awarded a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) for Early Stage Investigators from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The nearly $1.8 million grant began in August 2023 and will last for five years.
The goal of the MIRA-funded work is to understand how a specific type of cell structure called cytonemes are regulated and how these structures contribute to the ability of cells to coordinate their activities during patterning, using the fruit fly as a model organism.
She is also the principal investigator of a research grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke/ National Institutes of Health (NINDS/NIH) and the co-investigator of a Division of Mathematical Sciences/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (DMS/NIGMS) award.
She is a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, Society for Developmental Biology, and Genetics Society of America.
She came to Clarkson in the Fall of 2018.
