Emily Troemel Receives 2013 Merck Irving Sigal Memorial Award

April 15, 2013

By Kim McDonald

Emily Troemel

Assistant Professor Emily Troemel has won the 2013 Merck Irving Sigal Memorial Award from the American Society of Microbiology. Given in honor of Irving Sigal, who was instrumental in the early discovery of therapies to treat HIV/AIDS, the award recognizes early career scientists who have had commendable basic research in medical microbiology and infectious diseases.

Troemel, who will formally receive the award in Denver at the ASM meeting in May, has been using the nematode C. elegans to study questions of how pathogens attack their hosts and how hosts defend themselves against these attacks. In particular she has used C. elegans to study intestinal infections by microsporidia, which are ubiquitous but poorly understood pathogens.

She received her bachelor’s degree in science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then spent a year in Japan before receiving her Ph.D. in cell biology at UC-San Francisco. She worked for a start-up biotech company in the Bay Area before returning to academe to do a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital and then joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2008. She is also the recipient of a 2010-2013 Ray Thomas Edwards Foundation Award, a 2010-2015 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship and a 2010-2013 Searle Scholar award. More information on this year’s awards can be found at the American Society for Microbiology.