Congratulations to Josefa (Zefa) Sullivan, a third-year PhD student who received the Hausfeld Award, recognizing the most outstanding senior PhD student in Neuroscience at the Annual Friedman Brain Institute Retreat at the New York Academy of Medicine this evening. The award was established through a generous gift from Dr. David Hausfeld, who wanted to provide a mechanism to reward particularly outstanding students pursuing Neuroscience in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Mount Sinai.
Zefa joined Dr. Anne Schaefer's Laboratory in July 2014 with a keen interest in the epigenetic regulation of neuronal function and its effects on complex behaviors. Her groundbreaking dissertation research in the Schaeffer Laboratory focuses on dysfunctional transcriptional regulation as a basis for autism. Intrigued by recent studies showing that a large fraction of autism-associated genes encode rather ubiquitous epigenetic regulators of gene transcription, Zefa was thinking about different ways to attenuate neuronal transcription regulation in vivo, which has been a major challenge. She reasoned that these and other obstacles could be overcome by temporally-controlled pharmacological suppression of transcriptional initiation/elongation factor(s) that would allow her to address the impact of acute or chronic impairment of transcriptional regulation on animal behavior.
With these considerations in mind, Zefa developed the first ever pharmacologically-induced model of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that points to transcriptional gene dysregulation as potential key contributors to ASD in mice.
Zefa’s innovative work was awarded with a first author publication in The Journal of Experimental Medicine in Fall 2015, an exceptional achievement for a third-year PhD student. She was also co-author on a publication from the Schaefer Lab in Nature Neuroscience in 2016, and she has a publication currently under review in Science.
Her excellent academic performance was further recognized with a prestigious NRSA pre-doctoral fellowship award from the NIH.
In addition to excelling at her scholarly work, Zefa also stands out because of her unwavering involvement in many institutional activities that serve the neuroscience community and also for her devotion to helping others in her spare time. She is co-president of Mentoring in Neuroscience Discovery at Sinai (MiNDS), an outreach organization that brings hands-on neuroscience to students in our East Harlem neighborhood and broader New York City vicinity through classroom visits, interactive lectures, and demonstrations. She organizes the annual Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Brain Fair, an event in which dozens of middle and high school students visit Sinai and spend the day learning about neural anatomy, structure, and function. Zefa is also organizing the Mount Sinai community in an initiative to highlight the importance of publicly-funded scientific research.