November 1, 2006

CCGS/Genetics assistant professor Chuck Perou has been awarded the 2006 Jefferson-Pilot Fellowship in Academic Medicine. This fellowship is awarded each year by the UNC School of Medicine through a trust fund established by the Jefferson-Pilot Corporation. Recipients receive $20,000 over a four-year term to be used for scholarly endeavors at the recipient’s discretion. The aim of the fellowship is to recognize and retain promising junior faculty at UNC who have demonstrated substantial academic productivity and scholarly achievement in advance of tenure.

Dr. Perou was recruited to UNC in 2000 by the Department of Genetics and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.  He has since proven to be an exceptionally talented independent investigator, and is an emerging leader in his field of breast cancer genetics. The main focus of the Perou lab is to characterize the biological diversity of human tumors using DNA microarrays, molecular genetics, and cell biology with the goal of better classifying tumors into subtypes of clinical relevance.  The lab is currently identifying the signaling pathways that are activated within each subtype using proteomic and cell biological approaches. They are also interested in the cellular and molecular function of specific genes that either define each tumor subtype or are correlated with resistance to chemotherapy. Dr. Perou is a prolific collaborator who embraces an interdisciplinary approach to research, interacting closely with other geneticists, clinicians, epidemiologists, and statisticians to tackle a complex biomedical problem.