$2.9 Million in Awards for Penn Researchers from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to Launch Biomedical Research Careers |
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September 1, 2015, Volume 62, No. 03 |
Five early-career researchers from three schools at the University of Pennsylvania have received funding from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) for their excellence in biomedical research, in topics including heart disease, sleep and infectious diseases, as part of a nationwide program totaling $22.5 million.
“The Fund awards excellence at an individual level, and provides an opportunity for scientists to leverage our support into long and fruitful careers,” said BWF President, John E. Burris.
Ann M Hermundstad, a postdoctoral researcher in physics & astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, will receive $500,000 over five years as part of the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface, which are intended to foster the early career development of researchers in the physical/mathematical/computational sciences or engineering. Dr. Hermundstad studies how neurons coordinate with one another to support collective functionality, such as the ability to track a moving object or distinguish different smells. By studying this interplay, she hopes to gain insight into why the brain is organized as it is and how this organization enables organisms to function in a complex and dynamic world.
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Two Penn investigators will each receive Career Awards for Medical Scientists, which provide $700,000 over five years to facilitate the transition of the academic physician-scientist from a mentored position to a tenure-track faculty appointment. Recipients of these awards are:
Rajan Jain, an instructor in the department of medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the mechanisms of genome organization and how that influences cardiac cell development and maturation, to ultimately better understand heart disease. Specifically, Dr. Jain studies the protein network that surrounds the nucleus and how that is emerging as an important scaffold to organize large pieces of DNA that affects gene expression.
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Matthew Stern Kayser, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies the mechanisms by which sleep, a critical and highly conserved biological process, controls brain development. He aims to examine whether abnormal sleep early in life increases susceptibility to neurodevelopmental disorders and how sleep itself might be harnessed as a novel therapeutic modality.
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Two Penn investigators will each receive the Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease award, which provides $500,000 over five years to support accomplished investigators at the assistant professor level to study pathogenesis, with a focus on the interplay between human and microbial biology. Recipients of these awards are:
Igor E. Brodsky, an assistant professor of pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, will focus on the activity of an enzyme called caspase-8, which plays a key role in how the immune system defends against invading microbes. Dr. Brodsky’s research could help identify therapeutic targets to either boost or tone down the immune system’s response to infection or inflammation.
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Rahul Manu Kohli, an assistant professor of medicine, infectious disease division, in the Perelman School of Medicine, studies new approaches to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There is some evidence that when bacteria experience stress they can mutate at higher rates, which would facilitate their escape from antibiotics. Dr. Kohli plans to evaluate this possibility by generating bacteria strains to directly tune stress responses and ask how evolutionary dynamics are altered when the bacteria are challenged with antibiotics.
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