Christine Mayr, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Mayr received her M.D. from Free University in Berlin and her Ph.D. in Immunology from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. For her postdoc, she joined David Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute. During her postdoc, she found that oncogenes can get activated through 3′UTR shortening. In 2009, she started her own laboratory in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She is a full member of Sloan Kettering Institute and a Full Professor at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Science and at the Weill Cornell Medical College. Her lab studies the functions of mRNAs that go beyond their roles as templates for protein synthesis. Her lab discovered that 3′UTRs can regulate protein function by mediating protein-protein interactions. In 2016, she was awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to study this topic. More recently, her lab discovered two cytoplasmic condensates that promote protein complex assembly. The current focus of the lab is to annotate functions of long 3′UTRs and to learn how proteins take advantage of being translated in phase-separated cytoplasmic compartments.