Plumeri Award Winner: Mark Forsyth
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When asked to describe the neatest finding in his lab, Mark—in character—described not what he found, but what his students found. “I could go for some really recent stuff involving the artificial changes made in promoter regions of an H. pylori gene and the resulting gene expression changes, but…Beth Mole (2003) and Shannon McNulty (2004) in our lab found a genetic sequence in some strains in the lab that were much more frequently associated with H. pylori strains from Africa than elsewhere in the world. They then designed a nice double-blind study to look at this unusual sequence among African-Americans and found that most African-Americans possess H. pylori strains that are more closely related to strains still existing in Africa than strains anywhere else in the world. It really helped demonstrate the point that this bacterium is passed on predominantly among families.”
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Mark has a research leave upcoming, with plans to continue collaborative research with colleagues at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He’ll be splitting time between Vandy and W&M—he can’t stay away from the students in his lab for too long. Maybe on research leave he’ll have a chance to re-visit his first scientific love—birding—and add a few more species names to his life list. Congrats to Mark for now adding “Plumeri Award” to his list of accomplishments!
