By Deborah Wormser

Before setting out on a risky experimental track in Neuroscience as a first-year graduate student, Katie Schaukowitch used her head: She conducted two preliminary experiments to determine whether to pursue the project.

Promising results from those experiments led to a study published in 2014 in the scientific journal Molecular Cell. The investigation reported for the first time in neurons that enhancer RNAs (eRNAs), members of a class of long non-coding RNAs, are regulators of early transcription elongation, a step known to be critical in gene expression.

Ms. Schaukowitch’s study has implications for learning and memory as well as for conditions like autism and schizophrenia that can affect learning and memory, which are profoundly influenced by precise transcriptional control when the brain receives sensory input. Her achievements and spirit of discovery led to her selection as recipient of the 2015 Nominata Award, the highest honor bestowed on a student by the UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

“I feel extremely honored to have received this award. I am so grateful for the support I have received at UT Southwestern, especially from my mentor, Dr. Tae-Kyung Kim, and from my lab mates. Dr. Kim is an amazing scientist. As a mentor, he’s very supportive and easy to talk to, and clearly is so passionate about science,” she said. “I will always remember sharing the excitement of long discussions with everyone in the Kim lab about experiments that worked, new results, and where to go next.”

The recognition consists of $2,000 and the honor of presenting the final seminar of the University Lecture Series for the academic year. The now fifth-year graduate student’s lecture on May 20 is titled “Understanding a Function of Transcribed Enhancers.” Ryan McNamara, a student in the Molecular Microbiology graduate program, will receive the Dean’s Discretionary Award this year and its $1,000 prize.

Dr. Kim, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, said he felt fortunate to have Ms. Schaukowitch as his first graduate student at UT Southwestern. “She is packed with potential to grow as a prominent scientist,” he said.

To show those qualities more objectively, he pointed to her superior performance on the qualifying exam for the Mechanisms of Disease (MoD) translational research training program. It was so outstanding that every member of the qualifying committee commented on her performance to him, Dr. Kim said. He added that although Ms. Schaukowitch was the first graduate student in his UT Southwestern laboratory, he has mentored other graduate students as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard.

“Her performance, work ethic, and attitude were comparable to or even better than the successful students that I mentored at Harvard Medical School,” he said.

Ms. Schaukowitch grew up in Palo Alto, California. She attended the University of California San Diego, majoring in molecular biology with minors in cognitive science and classical studies and graduated with honors. She became interested in neuroscience in a class there called “Minds and Brains.”

“I like that there is still so much we don’t know about the brain,” Ms. Schaukowitch said. “It is also fascinating that the brain basically creates the reality that each of us experiences.”

She will return in the fall to finish her degree and said she eventually would like to become an independent researcher in academia at an institute like UT Southwestern.

“UT Southwestern is such an amazing place to do research,” she said.

Dr. Kim is a Distinguished Scholar in Neuroscience.