Christine Mayr MD, PhD

Christine Mayr, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Member of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Mayr received her MD from Free University, Berlin and her PhD from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. After a few years of Residency in the Department of Hematology-Oncology at the LMU Munich and a fellowship in tumor immunology, she joined David Bartel’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, MA as a postdoctoral fellow. She found that loss of 3’ untranslated regions (3’UTRs) can activate oncogenes. She showed that loss of 3’UTR sequence can occur through genetic aberrations such as chromosomal translocations. Later, she found that loss of 3’UTR sequence can also occur through gene-regulatory events that do not require changes in the DNA sequence, including the widespread 3’UTR shortening by alternative cleavage and polyadenylation that occurs in cancer. In July 2009, she was recruited to the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program of MSKCC where she studies the function and regulation of alternative 3’UTRs. In her own laboratory she found that alternative 3’UTR isoform expression is highly cell type-specific and that 3’UTRs can regulate protein localization and protein function. For her work she received the Kimmel Scholar Award and the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award.