Doctoral student Liza Makowski, who has bred mice resistant to atherosclerosis, has received the HSPH Faculty Council Student Research Award for her poster, "Insulin Resistance and Atherosclerosis: The Role of Fatty Acid-Binding Proteins," chosen as the best display at HSPH’s annual Poster and Exhibit Day on March 8. Makowski works in the Division of Biological Sciences. Her team members were her advisor Gökhan Hotamisligil, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition, and Kazuhisa Maeda, postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Biological Sciences.

"I felt really proud when I found out we had won," said Makowski. "The school has such a strong epidemiology base that I thought there would be a winner for an epidemiology poster and a second one for a lab-based poster."

Makowski studies how cells called macrophages break down fat and manage its byproducts. Macrophages are best known as front-line fighters in the immune system, devouring foreign cells with gustatory zeal. But recently, she and researchers in her lab confirmed that macrophages contain proteins that also help metabolize fat. Since then, Makowski has studied how proteins in macrophages trap fat and cholesterol within the cell. The work could greatly deepen researchers’ understanding of the development of atherosclerosis, a progressive disease in which fat and cholesterol engorge macrophages in the inner linings of arteries, creating plaque. The plaque can then clog the arteries, which may lead to heart attacks or strokes.

Makowski and Maeda have bred two lines of mice, one that has a predisposition to developing atherosclerosis and another that can’t create proteins that bind certain types of fat in macrophages. When these mice are bred together, their offspring se em to be protected against developing atherosclerosis, implying that the presence of certain proteins helps form the disease.

Interestingly, these proteins are also present in fat cells, an area that Makowski’s poster teammate Maeda is studying. He is researching the link between diabetes and heart disease by breeding mice deficient for proteins that bind fat. Although t hese mice become obese, which increases their risk of developing diabetes, they also seem to metabolize fat and manage glucose levels dramatically better than mice who still have the fat-binding proteins.

Taken together, Makowski and Maeda’s research provides an impressive body of work about metabolism in fat cells and macrophages.

Makowski and her teammates will receive a $500 prize for their poster.

Four finalists for the award were Marilyn Arnold for "Melanoma Prevention Website Project"; Andrey Egorov et al. for "Assessment of Health Effects of Microbiological Water Pollution and Exposures to Chlorination By-Products in Cherepovet s, Russia"; Lisa Hines et al. for "Genetic Variation in Alcohol Dehydrogenase and the Beneficial Effect of Alcohol Consumption on HDL Levels and Myocardial Infarction"; and Fan-fan Yu and Paul Catalano for "Percentile Regression for De velopmental Toxicity and Risk Assessment."