UW News

July 7, 2005

Presidential Early Career Award

Dr. William Grady, assistant professor of medicine at the UW and assistant member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has been honored as one of the country’s most promising young scientists. He joins three other UW faculty (see story in University Week) who were among the 58 winners of the Presidential Early Career Awards in Science and Engineering this year.

Grady is also an attending physician in the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and a research associate at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs sponsored Grady’s Presidential Early Career Award. He received an Advanced Research Career Development Award from the VA in 2002, when he was in Nashville, Tenn., and moved to Seattle last year.

He was recognized for his research into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of colon cancer. Grady studies transforming factor beta (TGF-B), which normally suppresses tumor growth. Colon cancers can become resistant to the effects of TGF-B by inactivating a receptor for the growth factor. Grady’s lab examines what happens in a cell when that receptor is inactivated.

Grady becomes the seventh School of Medicine faculty member to receive the award, first given by President Clinton in 1996. The awards were presented at the White House in June.