Graduate Students Fabian Lim and Matthew Maxwell Honored with 2024-2025 Founding Faculty Awards

December 10, 2024

By Mario Aguilera

In the past year, graduate students at UC San Diego have led innovative research initiatives across a vast range of fields.

Founding Faculty Award winners Fabian Lim and Matthew Maxwell

Katie Gardner Photography

Within the School of Biological Sciences, two of these studies are being recognized for their importance and impact. On October 29, the graduate students leading these studies were celebrated with 2024-2025 Biological Sciences Founding Faculty Awards for Graduate Excellence.

Fabian Lim is a sixth-year graduate student whose research predicts which changes within our noncoding genomes could lead to developmental defects and diseases. Working in Associate Professor Emma Farley's laboratory, Lim, Farley and their colleagues identified three human families in which single letter changes within an enhancer causes extra fingers. These mutations cause increased binding between enhancer DNA and proteins known as transcription factors which can lead to aberrant gene expression. This mechanism can help us find which changes within enhancers can affect gene expression across thousands of enhancers and cell types. Their work, "Affinity-optimizing enhancer variants disrupt development," was published in Nature. Lim was a co-first author alongside other lab members Joe Solvason and Genevieve Ryan.

Lim completed her bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology at UC San Diego. She joined Farley's lab as an undergraduate research volunteer as she has always been interested in understanding how our genomes provide the instructions for development and the diversity of life forms across evolution. She joined the School of Biological Sciences PhD program in 2019. In addition to the Founding Faculty Award, Lim recently won best presentation at an international limb meeting held in Dresden, Germany.

(from left) Associate Professor Diana Hargreaves, Associate Professor Emma Farley, graduate student Matthew Maxwell, graduate student Fabian Lim, Dean Pogliano and Professor Emeritus Stuart Brody.

Katie Gardner Photography

Matthew Maxwell, a sixth-year graduate student, joined Associate Professor Diana Hargreaves' Laboratory at The Salk Institute to study cancers with mutations in the tumor suppressor gene ARID1A. His Founding Faculty award honors his work on "ARID1A suppresses R-loop-mediated STING-type I interferon pathway activation of anti-tumor immunity," a paper published in the journal Cell. The study provides a molecular mechanism explaining improved immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapy responsiveness of ARID1A mutant tumors previously observed in clinical trials. Maxwell's discovery has the potential to both improve patient selection for ICB immunotherapy and provides a rationale for developing novel combination treatment strategies that could improve ICB efficacy.

Maxwell graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Biochemical Technology from Southeastern Oklahoma State University (SOSU). At SOSU, he studied how breast cancer cells adapt to oxidative stress and completed several summer undergraduate research internships at Harvard, UCLA and Novartis focused on cancer biology. At UC San Diego, Maxwell was the recipient of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program (GRFP) and HHMI Gilliam Predoctoral fellowships, completed a computational biology internship at the biopharmaceutical company Gilead and defended his PhD in October. Following his PhD, Maxwell will start a computational biology postdoctoral position at the precision medicine company Tempus AI focusing on precision medicine in colorectal cancer.

Awarded since 2015, Founding Faculty Awards are selected by a committee of Biological Sciences faculty members. Photos of Founding Faculty Award honorees are featured in the lobby of Bonner Hall.