Recent Grad Receives Competitive National Institutes of Health Award

Ani Nalbandian ’09 has received a two-year Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award from the National Institutes of Health. The program, designed for those who intend to continue their studies in graduate or medical school, provides an opportunity for doing biomedical research in the resource-rich environment of the National Institutes of Health. The program is highly selective with an acceptance rate of less than 10 percent.

The opportunity will allow Nalbandian, who was also offered a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Armenia, to continue building a strong foundation in science and medicine before entering medical school.

An Armenian-American, Nalbandian’s lifelong dream has been to become a doctor and offer accessibility to state-of-the-art medical care to the people of Armenia.

“My career goal is to become a doctor and go to Armenia to offer my services in a lasting way,” she says. “For instance, I want to establish formal relations with the medical community and to help bring the advances in medicine which we in the West enjoy, to all parts of Armenia. Whatever experiences I gain now — especially at a place such as the NIH — will give me more to give later.”

Under the direction of Dr. Yosuke Mukoyama, she will work to understand how the nervous and vascular systems are coordinated at a cellular and molecular level. Both network formations are dependent on the complicated interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic signals in development. Mukoyama’s lab is specifically interested in how neuronal signals control vascular branching networks during embryogenesis, and how vascular signals support adult neurogenesis and neural stem cell maintenance in the neurogenic region of the adult brain.

She will work in the Laboratory of Developmental Biology in Bethesda, Md. The laboratory is part of the Division of Intramural Research program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Nalbandian was a history major with a premedical concentration in the College Honors Program at Holy Cross. She was involved in many on-campus organizations, and served as president and founder of the Armenian Students’ Association and co-chair of the Bishop Healy Multicultural Society. She also blogged about religion for “On Faith,” an interactive Web site on religion produced jointly by Newsweek and washingtonpost.com.

For six months after graduating from Holy Cross she worked in a tissue engineering lab at Yale University School of Medicine. She had also worked there two summers during her college career, and based her College Honors Thesis, titled “Tissue Engineering: A Promising Outlook for Congenital Heart Diseases,” on her research work.

A native of Trumbull, Conn., Nalbandian has been living in Jerusalem since January, volunteering at Sts. Tarkmanchatz Armenian School, a private Armenian school for grades K-12. To learn more about Nalbandian’s work in Jerusalem, read her op-ed in the Armenian Reporter.