Danielle Grotjahn, PhD, has been named one of seven early career scientists to win the prestigious 2021 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, which provides each recipient with up to $800,000 over four years to advance novel approaches to fighting cancer. 

Grotjahn, a Scripps Fellow in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, will use the funds to study uncontrolled fragmentation of mitochondria, the microscopic compartments that generate energy for cells. This fragmentation is a unifying hallmark of many types of cancer, but the cellular processes that make it happen are poorly understood. 

Grotjahn will use powerful electron microscopes and pioneering image processing approaches to visualize this process inside cancer cells.