Rie Takahashi ’02 is one of thirty graduate students selected for The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans Class of 2008. The purpose of the Fellowships is to provide opportunities for continuing generations of able and accomplished New Americans to achieve leadership in their chosen fields. The Program is established in recognition of the contributions New Americans have made to American life and in gratitude for the opportunities the United States has afforded the donors and their family. The Fellowships are grants for up to two years of graduate study in the United States. The recipients are chosen on a nationally competitive basis. Thirty Fellowships will be awarded each year.
Rie is in the second year of her MD/PhD program at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics from University of California at Los Angeles in December 2006, completing two honors theses (the first person in her major to do so at University of California at Los Angeles) and graduating cum laude. Rie served for three years in the lab of a University of California at Los Angeles professor, working in the area of ovarian cancer and the effects of stress on angiogenesis and tumor metastases. For this work, she is a co-author of articles in Nature Medicine and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Her second honors thesis united her love of music, as an accomplished pianist, with her love of genetics, when she created a musical language for protein sequences, an achievement that received attention from newspapers, science magazines, and other media around the world. Called Gene2Music, the work was published in Genome Biology and given a special exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science.
Competing with music has been her dedication as a volunteer, working with such organizations as the University of California at Los Angeles Mobile Clinic, Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, Campamento Familiar and Camp Ronald McDonald. Rie intends to become a research scientist in a clinical setting doing research on molecular pathways involved in human diseases and overseeing their application to medical uses.
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