Damien D'amours BSc, MSc, PhD

Damien D’Amours began his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 1997, he was particularly interested in Nijmegen breakage syndrome (NBS), a disease that affects DNA repair and genome surveillance mechanisms. During his doctoral studies, he chose to investigate the specific cause of this disease, a dysfunction in the activity of the Mre11 complex in people affected by NBS. His research showed that the nuclear monitoring function of the Mre11 complex is vital for the maintenance of genomic integrity and the inability to perform this function is a likely cause for the high cancer rates in NBS patients.

He did his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He was awarded the prestigious Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation (2003-2005) to accomplish this phase of his career. His work led to the discovery of an essential and completely novel genome segregation mechanism acting during cell division. He also found that an intracellular signaling network called FEAR (for Cdc fourteen-early anaphase release) network plays a key role in the separation of heterochromatin to daughter cells during mitosis.