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Larissa Williams is the recipient of the Kenneth R. Keller Award for Excellence

Dr. Larissa Williams was selected by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at NCSU as the recipient of the Kenneth R. Keller Award for Excellence in Doctoral Dissertation Research. The Keller award consists of a plaque and cash award, and was presented at the Gamma Sigma Delta Honor Society for Agriculture spring banquet on April 13, 2011. She is the first student from Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology to receive this award.

Larissa completed a Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology in 2010 working in the labs of Drs. Margie Oleksiak (now at University of Miami) and Damian Shea. Her dissertation focused on detecting genomic signatures of natural selection in multiple populations of the estuarine minnow, Fundulus heteroclitus, which is adapted to chronic anthropogenic pollution at Federal Superfund sites along the east coast of the United States.

In October of 2010 Larissa joined the lab of Dr. Mark Hahn at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She has recently been awarded a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32) from the NIEHS which will fund her for three years (3/2011-2/2014). In her postdoc, Larissa will investigate developmental crosstalk between transcription factors responsible for potentially mediating the effects of toxicant exposure during development in zebrafish.

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