The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has announced that Can Cenik has been awarded a $2 million Faculty Recruitment Grant. The program recruits emerging investigators pursuing their first faculty appointment who have the ability to make outstanding contributions to the field of cancer research.
This fall, Cenik is joining the Department of Molecular Biosciences as an assistant professor. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2011 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University before coming to UT Austin.
Funds from the CPRIT award will be used to support Cenik's lab and his research. His research focuses on translation—a key part of the process that cells use to synthesize proteins. He seeks to better understand how healthy cells regulate translation and the changes that cancerous cells develop in their translation machinery. To further that work, he is developing a suite of experimental and computational tools for identifying regulatory sequences that are present on the same molecule of DNA as the genes they regulate.
Cenik is one of several new faculty members joining the Department of Molecular Biosciences in the 2018-2019 academic year, including his wife, Elif Cenik, who will join the faculty in January.
CPRIT is a state agency created when Texas voters approved a 2007 constitutional amendment authorizing the state to issue $3 billion in bonds to fund groundbreaking cancer research and prevention programs and services in Texas. To date, CPRIT has awarded $2.15 billion in grants, including $98.9 million to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.
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