New Alan Hall Award Offers a Ride to ASCB 2016 for a Grad Student or Early Postdoc

A travel award in honor of Alan Hall will take a grad student or first year postdoc to ASCB 2016. Photo: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

A travel award in honor of Alan Hall will take a grad student or first year postdoc to ASCB 2016. Photo: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

The unexpected death at 62 of Alan Hall sent a shockwave last May through the cell biology research community in the US and in the UK. That shock was felt mostly keenly by the “Alan Halls,” a transatlantic network of his former graduate students and postdocs who recalled Hall’s patience and support as pivotal to their early careers. Now there will be one more “Alan Hall.” The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), where Hall was Editor-In-Chief, is funding a travel and per diem expense award for a grad student or first year postdoc to attend ASCB 2016 in San Francisco, December 3-7. The deadline is November 7. Details are here.

Hall, who joined ASCB in 1995, became Chair of Cell Biology in 2006 at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He was renowned for his discoveries while at University College London and at the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) on the RhoGTPase family for which he won the 2006 Canada Gairdner International Award. Hall originally studied chemistry at Oxford University but switched to biochemistry for a graduate program there with Jeremy Knowles. Two months into the program, Knowles moved his lab to Harvard University and took Hall with him. Hall took his PhD at Harvard in 1977 before returning to the UK and eventually finding a position at ICR.

 

Anne Ridley, a former ASCB Council member and a PI at Kings College London, was one of Hall’s early postdocs at ICR and one of the first “Alan Halls.” Last spring, Ridley recalled, “He was such a fantastic mentor so we are a big family. We might be separated by ten years or more in the time we were in his lab but it doesn’t matter. The Alan Halls are all connected.”

 

The winner of JCB’s Alan Hall Memorial Travel Award to ASCB 2016 will be the next connected.

About the Author:


John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.