José Delgado & Hannah Opalko receive
2023 E. Lucile Smith Award for Scientific Excellence in Biochemistry
The Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology is pleased to announce José Delgado and Hannah Opalko as the recipients of the 2023 E. Lucile Smith Award for Scientific Excellence in Biochemistry. The Smith Awards honor the ground-breaking career of Dr. E. Lucile Smith, the first woman to attain the rank of Professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. José and Hannah received this award in recognition of their exceptional research accomplishments during the past year. The Dr. E. Lucile Smith awards are funded by the generosity of Dr. Smith’s nephew Gray Parker, his wife Mary Kay, and the Booth-Bricker Fund.
José is being recognized for his accomplishments as a Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Dr. Christopher Shoemaker. José successfully defended in January 2024 and graduated with his Ph.D. in March 2024. José combines functional genomics, fluorescence microscopy, and biochemistry to dissect mechanisms of autophagy. His work focuses on mitochondrial autophagic degradation, dubbed mitophagy, mediated by tail-anchored proteins. This cellular process is often dysregulated in human pathologies, including cancer. José’s work, recently published in The EMBO Journal, demonstrates new mode of protein regulation of a key tail-anchored protein that mediates mitophagy. Overall hinting at a novel regulatory axis that is utilized to meet the metabolic demands of the cell.
Hannah is being recognized for her accomplishments as a postdoctoral research scientist in the lab of Dr. James Moseley. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Dartmouth and continued in the Moseley lab to perform her postdoctoral work. Hannah’s work sought to understand how the cell positions clusters of the protein Cdr2 which are involved in mitotic signaling and cytokinetic ring formation. Cdr2 localizes to the plasma membrane at the cell center. Hannah and her co-authors found that the cell uses multiple redundant mechanisms for Cdr2 positioning. The nucleus and a tether known as Arf6 act as positive cues holding Cdr2 in the center, while an inhibitor kinase and membrane flow prevent Cdr2 from accumulating at the cell tips. Collectively, this work can help inform how other spatial patterns are created within a cell. This work was published in Molecular Biology of the Cell in 2023. Hannah currently works as a Scientist at Celdara Medical.