Tanya Petrossian '05

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Two exceptional graduate students in the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have been selected to attend a prestigious meeting of more than 60 Nobel laureates and the world's premier students in the medieval city of Lindau, Germany, in July.

Erin Broderick and Tanya Petrossian ’05 are among just 94 American students — and 694 students overall — who were selected based on distinguished research in the fields of chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine after a rigorous, intensive screening process.

The Nobel laureates are from the United States, Europe, Russia, Asia and Israel. The Interdisciplinary Meeting of Nobel Laureates provides a forum for the transfer of knowledge between generations of outstanding scientists.

Broderick and Petrossian will attend a program of lectures, panel discussions, seminars and social events at the meeting in Lindau, after first meeting the other American student participants in Washington, D.C.

A 'Fearless' Scientist

Tanya Petrossian is interested in finding new biochemical pathways that may be important in preserving human health. Her research could have implications for treating cancer and other diseases, targeting harmful proteins and enhancing the body's repair enzymes. Petrossian is a member of UCLA Alumni of Orange County and received a UCLA Alumni Scholarships during her undergraduate years.

"My research is a combination of bioinformatics and biochemistry," Petrossian says. "We are interested in analyzing the human proteins that have been sequenced in the Human Genome Project. There are about 25,000 proteins that have been sequenced, but the functions of many of the proteins are not known. I am trying to identify functions of more than 200 of the unknown proteins."

Petrossian, who is completing her Ph.D. work this summer in Professor Steven Clarke's laboratory, makes models and structures of enzymes and studies how molecules and atoms interact. In addition to her thesis work at UCLA, Petrossian participated in an internship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York through a UCLA program directed by Professor Kendall Houk and funded by the National Institutes of Health, which integrates chemistry and biology. There, she studied new biomarkers for breast cancer.