Assistant professor wins international ‘young investigator’ award

By Leila Ugincius

The International Liver Transplantation Society has named Valeria Mas, Ph.D., assistant professor in the VCU Department of Surgery, one of six winners of its Young Investigator award. The award will be presented during the society’s 13th Annual International Congress in June in Brazil.

Mas’ work involved the study of high-density, oligonucleotide microarrays in the gene expression patterns in HCV cirrhotic liver tissues of patients undergoing liver transplantation.

“From this analysis, we observed different groups of patients with differentially expressed genes and we performed associations with post-liver transplantation outcomes,” Mas explained.

Mas and her mentor, Daniel Maluf, M.D., assistant professor in VCU’s surgery department, will present their award-winning data during the annual meeting’s first-ever Rising Star Symposium. This is the first year the ITLS has presented the young investigator award. Each winner will receive $1,500.

The society, which was founded in 1990, has more than 700 members from a multidisciplinary array of specialists and health care providers. The society seeks to raise the standard of care for patients and to promote education and research. One of its top priorities is to identify and support young investigators in the liver transplantation research field.

Winning the award brings international notice to the advances in molecular research being made at the Hume-Lee Transplant Center at the VCU Medical Center, Mas said.

Besides teaching in the departments of surgery and pathology, Mas is director of the Research Molecular Transplant Laboratory. She received her doctoral degree in biochemistry in 2000 at the National University of San Luis in Argentina. From 2001 to 2003, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Molecular Diagnostic Division in the VCU Department of Pathology.