The White House announced that Erica Larschan, assistant professor of biology, has won a highly prized Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering — PECASE, the nation’s highest honor for young researchers in those fields. Larschan and the other winners will receive their awards from President Obama July 31. Larchan’s award citation applauds her “for studies of coordinate gene regulation during Drosophila dosage compensation.” Some of her research in the field was published last year in Nature. Now she says she is looking at fighting disease: “The PECASE award will allow my laboratory to explore exciting new research directions such as probing the dynamics of gene regulation in real time. In the future, we plan to translate our insights about how genomes are regulated into therapeutic targets for anti-cancer drugs.”