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:

Edmund C. Schwartz

Department of Neuroscience Columbia University / New York, NY

I am developing methods to control gene expression and recombination with light. This will allow greater spatial and temporal control than can be achieved with current genetic and chemical methods.

I majored in chemistry and biology at the University of Virginia, where I worked in the lab of Michael Timko. I discovered that, even though I was studying an algae that most people have never heard of, it was still really cool to be the first in the world to know something. Also, during my first year, the UVA football team was briefly ranked in the top ten, an accomplishment which I can only assume was thanks to my presence. In graduate school at Rockefeller University, I did my research in the laboratory of Tom Muir, playing with molecular legos for five and a half years and getting a PhD out of that experience as a bonus. Currently I’m in Richard Axel’s lab at Columbia, where I feel a little out of place among the real biologists. All my time outside of work is now taken up chasing around a two-year-old.

FELLOW:

Marion Silies

Departments of Neurobiology Stanford University School of Medicine / Stanford, CA

My current research interest is visual system function in fruit flies. I want to understand how different behaviorally relevant visual cues, such as motion or polarized light information, are processed in the Drosophila brain.

I am from Germany. I studied biology and chemistry at the University of Münster, where I worked in a plant pathology lab as an undergraduate; I also did internships at Washington State University and Edinburgh University. During that time I became interested in neuroscience and subsequently studied the development of the nervous system for my diploma thesis and PhD at the Department of Neurobiology in Münster. I used the fly embryonic peripheral nervous system to study how neurons and glial cells communicate in order to coordinate axonal outgrowth with glial cell migration. For my postdoc I switched from developmental to functional aspects of neuroscience. Outside the lab, I enjoy exploring the Bay area on my road bike or hiking, and meeting friends.

FELLOW:

Mansi Srivastava

Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Cambridge, MA

Many animal species are able to regenerate missing body parts or even entire body plans. I am using molecular and genomic tools to study regeneration and learn whether regeneration mechanisms in various species were inherited from their common ancestor or if they have evolved independently. Discovering conserved mechanisms might reveal previously unknown but potentially critical aspects of regeneration in animals.

During college, I studied development, regeneration, and asexual reproduction in segmented worms. My graduate work focused on the genomes of early animal lineages such as sea anemones and sponges to learn about early animal evolution. Such comparative genomic analyses have allowed us to infer changes in gene content, gene structure, and genomic organization that accompanied the appearance of animals and their subsequent radiation into phyletic lineages. However, we don’t yet understand the functions of the genomic innovations unique to animals. I am now studying the evolution of a particular biological process, focusing on how the functions of a few genes have evolved. For this research, I have returned to my interest in regeneration which, with the help of modern genetic tools, can be studied at molecular and cell biological levels in many species.