Third place – a new addition this year – with a prize of $1,000 was awarded to Lyndsay Murrow, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Zev Gartner, PhD, for her talk, “Mapping Breast Cancer Risk.”
Murrow described her work on how the rise and fall of hormones in the menstrual cycle drive breast cancer risk. To understand the effect in humans, she gathered cells from women who had breast reduction surgery at different points in their cycle and used RNA sequencing to “collapse them into a single virtual time course.” She could then see how the cyclical hormones send messages that help cancer cells grow.