Chen Awarded First Mouchly Small Mda Fellowship

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Ning Chen, M.D., a research assistant at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, has been awarded the first S. Mouchly Small Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) Research Fellowship at the University at Buffalo.

Funded by the national MDA, the fellowship honors Small, former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University at Buffalo and multi-term president of the organization.

Internationally known for his research in psychiatry, he supported MDA in its formative stages, continuing until his death in 1996.

The competitive, $32,000 annual award, given for each of six years, will support a fellow whose research relates to any of the 40 disorders under the MDA "umbrella."

Chen, a doctoral candidate in the Molecular and Cellular Biology and Pathobiology program at MUSC, will begin his UB fellowship on July 1.

Chen's primary research, to be conducted with Richard Almon, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences, will focus on the effects of disuse, corticosteroids and growth hormone on muscle gene expression.

He also will work on molecular genetic studies of carnitine palmitoyl transferase deficiencies in the laboratory of Georgirene Vladutiu, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and neurology.

A graduate of Nanjing Medical University in Nanjing, China, Chen was a research associate in the Wellcome Medical Research Institute of the University of Otago Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand, before coming to the U.S.