| T H E N I H C A T A L Y S T | J U L Y – A U G U S T 2007 |
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'O PIONEERS!': A DAY TO CELEBRATE THE VISIONS OF PIONEER AWARDEES -AND ANNOUNCE THE NEWEST RECIPIENTS
One researcher is using methods rooted in physics and engineering to understand the emergence of autoimmune diseases. Another is crafting new ways of observing protein folding inside living cells. And a third aims to build a catalog of the microbial organisms inhabiting the human body to help explain the roles of these communities in health and disease.
These scientists are among the 13 recipients of the 2006 NIH Director's Pioneer Award who will report on their research progress at the third annual Pioneer Award Symposium on Wednesday, September 19.
During the event in the Natcher Conference Center (Building 45), NIH Director Elias Zerhouni will also announce the newest group of awardees. The symposium agenda is at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer/symposium2007/index.aspx. Attendance is free and registration is not required.
The NIH Director's Pioneer Award program is part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research and provides each awardee with $2.5 million in direct costs over five years to support highly innovative, and potentially transformative, research.
The goal is to identify scientists whose ideas could have especially significant impact but whose research proposals may be too novel or untested to fare well in the traditional peer-review process.
Researchers at all career levels and working in a broad range of disciplines- from engineering and mathematics to the behavioral and social sciences- are encouraged to apply, as long as they are interested in exploring biomedically relevant topics.
"The Pioneer Award supports particularly creative approaches to major biomedical research challenges," said Zerhouni. "The program's annual symposium offers an exceptional opportunity to hear from an enterprising group of scientists whose cutting-edge research represents an important element of the NIH portfolio."
The symposium will begin at 8:15 a.m. with opening remarks by Zerhouni and Jeremy Berg, NIGMS director, who oversees the Pioneer Award program.
The symposium will conclude with a poster session and concurrent reception from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. The posters will showcase the work of the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Pioneer Award recipients and members of their labs.
For more information on the 35 awardees and their research interests, see http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer/AwardRecipients.aspx. For an overview of the Pioneer Award and its history as part of the NIH Roadmap, see http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer/.
UPCOMING TALKS BY LAST YEAR'S AWARDEES
The talks by last year's awardees at the third annual NIH Director's Pioneer Award Symposium, this September 19 at Natcher Conference Center, will begin at 8:50 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. (with breaks and lunch interspersed). The speakers and the titles of their talks are:
- Karla Kierkegaard, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.: "Dominant Drug Targets in RNA Viruses"
- Evgeny Nudler, New York University School of Medicine, New York: "New Approaches to Fight Bacterial Infections"
- David Relman, Stanford University: "It's a Jungle in There: Explorations of the Human Microbiome"
- Kwabena Boahen, Stanford University: "Neurogrid: Emulating a Million Neurons in the Cortex"
- Younan Xia, University of Washington, Seattle: "Putting Nanostructures to Work for Biomedical Research"
- Arup Chakraborty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: "Understanding Adaptive Immunity and Its Aberrant Regulation: A Crossroad of the Physical, Life, and Engineering Sciences"
- Lila Gierasch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: "Moving the Protein Folding Problem from the Test Tube to the Cell"
- Gary Pielak, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "Protein Biophysics Under Physiological Conditions"
- Thomas Kodadek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas: "Monitoring the Immune System with Synthetic Molecule Microarrays: A New Route to Biomarker Discovery"
- Rosalind Segal, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston: "Proteoglycan Interactions with Sonic Hedgehog Are Selectively Required for Mitogenic Responses"
- James Sherley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Making Human Adult Stem Cell Expansion Routine"
- Rebecca Heald, University of California, Berkeley: "Elucidating Mechanisms of Intracellular Scaling"
- Cheng Chi Lee, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: "Suspended Animation of Non-hibernating Mammals"