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Governor General’s Gold Medal
By Robie Liscomb
Tello. Photo: UVic Photo Services
It’s no wonder that Javier Tello is this year’s recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal for outstanding grade point average and dissertation. He received his PhD in biology in May 2008 and has published ten scholarly papers based on his dissertation research in top scientific journals.
“I’ve always been fascinated by biological systems,” Tello explains. And that passion and curiosity has led him to make significant contributions to our understanding of hormone evolution.
Tello earned his BSc in biochemistry at UVic and then went on for his PhD in molecular biology, working with Dr. Nancy Sherwood. “What I liked about the Department of Biology was the feeling of community where fellow graduate students, post-docs and professors openly discussed their research goals and offered alternate viewpoints that often improved each other’s work,” he says.
For his dissertation, Tello examined genes critical for controlling reproduction. In humans, a master hormone made by nerve cells in the brain triggers a cascade of events in the reproductive system essential for the maturation of germ cells and the production of sex steroids. Tello discovered that an ancient group of animals without backbones have hormones closely related to this human brain hormone. One animal he studied was the amphioxus, an ancient sea creature that has fascinated scientists for hundreds of years as a possible ancestor to all vertebrates, including humans. Tello found amphioxus not only has the specialized receptors that bind the human brain hormone, but two of these receptors foreshadow all the vertebrate-type receptors. These findings show that the origin of the brain hormone and receptors that control reproduction are more than half a billion years old.
Currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Medical Research Council’s Human Reproductive Sciences Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, Tello is testing novel treatments to increase the fertility of patients with reproductive diseases and investigating a drug candidate that shows promise as a new contraceptive. He is also investigating the development of specialized neurons in the brain and how they form complex networks during human embryonic growth, setting the stage for reproductive onset during puberty.
Born in Toronto, Tello went to high school in Oak Bay, becoming an excellent rugby player until sidelined by a back injury in his mid 20s. Tello hopes to return to Canada to set up his own lab in the field of reproductive endocrinology and neuroendocinology. “Ideally, it would have close ties with a clinic, allowing for new discoveries to be translated into useful advances for human health,” he says.
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