We are deeply saddened to say that Kristin Wilson Cerione, Rick’s beloved wife and mother of their children, Chloe and Quintin, passed away on April 22nd, after a month-long battle with a severe infection. Kristin did her undergraduate degree in Zoology at Duke and then came to Cornell where she obtained a PhD in biochemistry and met her future husband, Rick. Kristin was the perfect scientific partner of Rick’s, often keeping his research ideas grounded to help ensure success in the various projects ongoing in the laboratory and in many manuscript submissions and grant applications. During Kristin’s thesis research, she made important discoveries that showed the Cdc42 GTPase signaled the activation of a major protein kinase mTOR, which is important in a wide range of physiological processes and disease states. She would then become a driving force behind the discovery and characterization of a novel Cdc42-dependent mTOR signaling complex which Kristin named DockTOR because its assembly, which plays a critical role in the survival and metastatic spread of cancer cells, is triggered by the Cdc42 binding partner Dock7. Kristin was a mentor to several of the graduate students who came through the laboratory during the past 30 years and was a devoted colleague and friend to many throughout the Cornell and Ithaca communities. As one of Kristin’s close colleagues, Marc Antonyak, observed, she rarely sought the spotlight, but her fingerprints were everyone in the accomplishments of the laboratory. She will be greatly missed.
