Our Mission

The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research is dedicated to providing financial support to offer highly qualified scientists the opportunity to pursue research into the causes and origins of cancer.

The goal of the Fund is to provide support to the brightest individual scientists pursuing careers in cancer research while promoting and emphasizing the value and contribution of the individual in keeping with the spirit of the conception of the Fund.

FINANCIAL REPORTS

2008 FINANCIAL REPORT >
2007 FINANCIAL REPORT >

JCC FUND NEWSLETTERS
Check out our current and past newletters to find out about the newest JCCF fellows and what they are researching, details on our annual retreats, and other interesting articles.

2012 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2011 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2010 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2009 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2008 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2007 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2006 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >
2005 JCC FUND NEWSLETTER >

We will accept referee and sponsor letters by email until February 15. Referees may send letters and ratings (from A to E) directly to us at letters@jccfund.org. Sponsor letters may also be sent to the same address. Please paste the contents of your letter inside the body of your email.

THE JANE COFFIN CHILDS FUND FELLOWS 2010 – 2013

FELLOW:

Antoine E. Roux

Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry University of California, San Francisco / San Francisco, CA

My project focuses on the biology of aging in the nematode C. elegans. I am studying early stochastic determinant of life span that are not linked to hereditary traits.

I grew up in France and moved to Canada to do my PhD work at the University of Montréal, where I studied cellular aging in fission yeast. I developed this yeast species (called S. pombe) as a new model to study aging, describing the first long-lived mutants of this organism. I was passionate about my research and today in Cynthia Kenyon’s lab at UCSF I am tackling new questions in aging using C. elegans as a model. In the past 20 years, research has demonstrated that aging is not a random process but one that is tightly regulated. We now know about many genes and conditions that extend life span and at the same time delay the onset of age-related diseases. However many mysteries remain: What determines aging at the molecular level? Why are aging rates different between individuals in a given species? Why do some species live longer than others?

FELLOW:

Rahul Roy

Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University, Cambridge, M

Current Research: Probing gene expression in live eukaryotic cells at single molecule level

I majored in biotechnology and biochemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India and joined the biophysics and computational biology graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001. I received my doctorate in 2007 for my work on understanding the mechanism of various proteins involved in replication and transcription using in vitro single molecule techniques in the Taekjip Ha laboratory. I am currently a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Sunney Xie. My current research interests are twofold: 1) development of novel optical imaging techniques to probe the behavior of single biomolecules in live eukaryotic cells; and 2) implementation of single-molecule imaging to understand cellular gene expression and cell-fate determination. My efforts are geared towards extending the usefulness of single molecule techniques to mainstream biology.

FELLOW:

Anne-Lore Schlaitz

Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, Division of Cell & Developmental Biology University of California, Berkeley / Berkeley, CA

I am interested in how the internal organization of eukaryotic cells is achieved by the interaction of cytoskeletal elements with organelles.

I was drawn to science early on because of my excellent high school teacher for biology and chemistry. I was particularly fascinated by the fact that relatively simple organic compounds can direct the complex processes we know as “life.” Consequently, I chose to study biochemistry at the University of Tübingen in Germany to learn more about life’s molecular basis. Again captivated by a wonderful class, this time on cell organelles, I became more interested in how cells work and was able to pursue these questions with both my master's and PhD theses at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Dresden, Germany. For my postdoc, I was able to combine my chief interests in cell biology, membrane and cytoskeletal cell biology, and given the chance to investigate how linker proteins of microtubules and membranes contribute to the spatial organization of cells.