NEWS

Zhang receives prestigious award for cancer research

Dr. Yi Zhang, assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s department of biochemistry and biophysics and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, has been awarded the American Association of Cancer Research’s 2003 Gertrude B. Elion Cancer Research Award.

The honor is awarded to only one tenure-track assistant professor nationwide. The award, which carries a $50,000 grant, is given to the most meritorious laboratory, clinical and transnational young research scientist.

The award was established in 1993 in honor of the late Dr. Gertrude B. Elion, Nobel laureate and scientist emeritus at Glaxo Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline), who had served as president and honorary member of the association. She also was an adjunct UNC faculty member, an emeritus member of the Lineberger center and a longtime Chapel Hill resident.

"Yi Zhang’s accomplishments during his first three years as a UNC faculty member have been extraordinary," said Dr. Shelton Earp, Lineberger center director. "His multiple publications in the world’s best journals are providing a whole new level of understanding regarding the control of gene expression and why it goes awry in cancer."

The American Association of Cancer Research is a scientific society of more than 19,000 laboratory and clinical cancer researchers.

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Author Spencer, banjo legend to speak at UNC April 22, 23

Author Elizabeth Spencer and banjo player Billy Faier will lecture, with Faier also picking a few licks, on April 22 and April 23, respectively, at UNC. The free public lectures will be at 7:30 p.m. in 8 Gardner Hall (Spencer) and 12:30 p.m. in 569 Hamilton Hall (Faier).

Spencer, of Chapel Hill, wrote the 1998 memoir "Landscapes of the Heart" and novels "Fire in the Morning" and "The Light in the Piazza." Her short story collections include "Jack of Diamonds." She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, having won two of its awards for writing. She also has won the John Dos Passos Award for Literature and taught creative writing at UNC, the University of Mississippi and Concordia University in Montreal.

In her memoir, Spencer describes her encounters with writers William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Alberto Moravia and her friendships with Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren. North Carolina poet laureate Fred Chappell has called "Landscapes" "a damn dandy book, full of wit, sly observation, love of literature, passion for life. What it shows most of all is the steel-tough strength that underlies the delicacy of her fiction."

Faier, of Lake Hills, N.Y., has produced numerous banjo and guitar teaching records and performance recordings, and he has played on many anthologies of banjo greats. Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Faier was a prominent member of the folk scene around Washington Square in lower Manhattan in the late 1940s. He moved to California in 1951, and there worked in nightclubs, taught music, gave concerts and hosted a weekly radio show on Berkeley’s KPFA.

In the 1960s, Faier hosted a folk music radio show on WBAI in New York City, on which Bob Dylan was a guest. He also edited the folk music magazine "Caravan." His many recordings include "Art of the Five-String Banjo" (Riverside, 1957), "Travelin’ Man" (Riverside, 1958) and "How to Play Folk Guitar" (Elektra, 1967).

The talks extend two lecture series sponsored by UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South. Spencer’s will be the last this spring of the "Writing the South" series; Faier’s, of "Centering the South." For more information, call 962-5665

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