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University Park, Pa. -Peter Eric Dowd, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has been selected as the first recipient of the Robert T. Simpson Graduate Student Award for Innovative Research.  The award was presented at the inaugural Robert T. Simpson Lectureship in Molecular Medicine.

Throughout his research, Dowd has mastered technically challenging and demanding techniques, and has initiated new projects.  His research has focused on defining the molecular processes that regulate the growth of the tips of pollen tubes.  Tip growth is a form of polarized growth exhibited by a few highly specialized cells, such as pollen tubes, root hairs, fungal hyphae, and neurons.  In addition to playing an essential role in fertilization, pollen tubes provide a model system for studying the machinery required for tip growth. 

"Peter's judicious use of molecular and cell biological techniques in this project is truly a tour-de-force," said Teh-hui Kao, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.  Dowd's results suggest that the enzyme phospholipase-C (PLC) in pollen can act as a multifunctional integrator of the pollen-tube tip-growth process by regulating membrane function and the formation and disruption of the skeleton of the pollen tube.  As a result, PLC can help direct growth of the pollen tube as it is growing to reach the egg during fertilization.  This parallels the steering of growth in seemingly different cellular contexts, such as the first stages in metastasizing cancer cells.

Dowd received a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Massachusetts .  While there, he received the Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellowship.  Since arriving at Penn State in 1996, Dowd has received the Roberts Graduate Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health Predoctoral Graduate Fellowship for Student with Disabilities.  In 2005, Dowd presented his paper "PetPLC1, a phospholipase C of Petunia inflata, is involved in pollen tube growth" at the International Conference on Plant Lipid Mediated Signaling.

The Robert T. Simpson Graduate Student Award for Innovative Research was created in 2005 to recognize innovative research by graduate students who have made important contributions in forwarding the research in their selected areas of study and who work in the laboratory of a faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State .

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