Dr. Batra to receive university’s ORCA honor

Surinder Batra, Ph.D., Stokes-Shackleford Professor and chair of biochemistry and molecular biology, has been award the University of Nebraska’s highest honor for research, the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity (ORCA) Award.

Dr. Batra will be recognized during today’s annual faculty meeting. Dr. Batra will officially receive the award at a reception in Lincoln.

Dr. Batra has long been one of UNMC’s top investigators. He was recognized as Scientist Laureate for 2012.

But Jennifer Larsen, M.D., vice chancellor for research, said Dr. Batra deserves the award as much for his overall contribution to science, as he does for his own personal accomplishments.

“As I have watched Dr. Batra grow first as an investigator, then as a collaborator and now as a research leader, not only at UNMC, but across the U.S., I continue to be impressed with his nonstop energy and his passion not just for his own areas of research but for making sure that the people around him are also successful,” Dr. Larsen said.

Dr. Batra serves as principal investigator or project leader on multiple major National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded projects.

He and several others at UNMC, including Tony Hollingsworth, Ph.D., a longtime collaborator, have made the medical center’s pancreatic cancer research program one of the best of its kind in the world.

Dr. Batra is best known within the scientific community for his work related to MUC4, a new mucin gene he has cloned and characterized, and first determined its role in pancreatic cancer. He and his team have since found it plays a role in ovarian, breast, lung and cervical cancers as well.

He continues to research its possibility as an early diagnostic or prognostic biomarker, and thus a possible target for new drug therapies.

He also explores other avenues to attack pancreatic cancer.

“I am confident he will succeed in identifying either new early diagnostic markers and or targets for treatment for pancreatic cancer in my lifetime,” Dr. Larsen said.

“But his work already has changed the paradigm for understanding pancreatic cancer pathobiology.”

It has done so, in part, thanks to his efforts as a leader, a collaborator and a mentor. Dr. Batra solves problems by putting people together.

“He is constantly moving,” Dr. Larsen said, “leveraging what he has learned toward a new target, identifying new faculty to recruit, or identifying a new grant opportunity he believes UNMC as a whole can successfully pursue.”