Ansari named 2006 Shaw Scientist
University of Wisconsin - Madison Assistant Professor Aseem Z. Ansari, who received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1995 and his B.Sc. from St. Xavier’s College, in 1987, is a recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s 2006 Shaw Scientist Award. The annual Shaw Award provides $200,000 in unrestricted funds that a scientist can use to pursue essential first work of sufficient importance.
Ansari did post-graduate work at Harvard University (chemical biology major, 1995-1998) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center/Cornell Medical School (chemical genomics major, 1998-2001). He holds appointments in the UW-Madison Department of Biochemistry and the Genome Center of Wisconsin.
The research of Ansari and his team could form the core of new therapies that allow for 'individualized medicine' to treat many diseases, including diabetes and cancer. The team is working with transcription factors, which control gene expression, or how genes within a cell are turned on and off. These factors are key to the life and death of the cell, and their malfunction is at the heart of a variety of diseases. Ansari's team is creating novel chemical mimics of a class of transcription factors that control body plan development in humans. Such artificial transcription factors (ATFs) will be applied to dissect complex networks of genes that control the fate of human embryonic stem cells.