Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D., Boston College professor of psychology, who will study how the brain creates emotional experiences like anger and happiness.
Peter Bearman, Ph.D., Columbia University professor of social science, who will study the role of social and environmental factors in autism.
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital professor of anesthesia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of computational neuroscience and health sciences and technology, who will develop a systems neuroscience approach to study how anesthetic drugs act in the brain to create the state of general anesthesia.
Thomas R. Clandinin, Ph.D., Stanford University assistant professor of neurobiology, who will pursue a genetics-based approach to understanding how the brain computes.
James J. Collins, Ph.D., Boston University professor of biomedical engineering, who will develop systems biology and synthetic biology approaches to analyze the bacterial gene regulatory networks underlying cellular responses to antibiotics.
Margaret Gardel, Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of physics, who will establish new frameworks to study the physical behaviors of systems of multiprotein complexes.
Takao K. Hensch, Ph.D., Children’s Hospital Boston professor of neurology, who will explore the role of noncoding RNAs in brain development and as a potential treatment for brain disorders.
Marshall S. Horwitz, M.D., Ph.D., University of Washington School of Medicine professor of medicine, pathology, and genome sciences, who will track mutations to map the fate of cells during embryonic development.
Rustem F. Ismagilov, Ph.D., University of Chicago associate professor of chemistry, who will develop and validate microfluidic technologies for quantitative studies of protein aggregation and aging.
Frances E. Jensen, M.D., Children’s Hospital Boston professor of neurology, who will examine how seizures in early life alter the developing brain and lead to cognitive disorders.
Mark J. Schnitzer, Ph.D., Stanford University assistant professor of biological sciences and applied physics, who will create technology for massively parallel brain imaging to allow large-scale, systematic studies of normal and diseased neural circuits.
Gina Turrigiano, Ph.D., Brandeis University professor of biology, who will develop a very high-resolution microscope for probing the molecular structure of synapses.
2007 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Recipients
Kjersti Aagaard-Tillery, M.D., Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine assistant professor of maternal-fetal medicine, who will study how maternal obesity programs genetic modifications and adaptations in the developing fetus that predispose it to adult diseases.
Ryan C. Bailey, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assistant professor of chemistry, who will develop an ultrasensitive measurement technology to provide a picture of disease onset and progression at the molecular level.
Ed Boyden, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor of biological engineering, who will invent and study new methods of controlling the neural circuits that malfunction in neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Frances A. Champagne, Ph.D., Columbia University assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, who will investigate the transmission of reproductive behavior across generations through genetic modifications that do not involve DNA sequence changes.
Sean Davies, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University research assistant professor of pharmacology, who will develop genetically engineered bacteria that could be used as dietary supplements for the long-lasting drug treatment of chronic diseases.
Pedro Fernandez-Funez, Ph.D., University of Texas Medical Branch assistant professor of neurology, who will use fruit flies and mice to study the biology of prion proteins, which cause neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and mad cow diseases.
Sarah Fortune, M.D., Harvard School of Public Health assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases, who will investigate the mechanisms by which tuberculosis escapes the immune system response.
Levi A. Garraway, M.D., Ph.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute assistant professor of medicine, who will use a novel genetic and chemical screening approach to identify changes in malignant melanoma tumor cells that could be targets for new treatments.
Tawanda Gumbo, M.D., University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas assistant professor of internal medicine, who will develop a treatment regimen based on blocking the mechanisms that tuberculosis bacteria use to evade killing by antibiotics.
Nir Hacohen, Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital assistant professor of medicine, who will use a new genetic approach to dissect immune system pathways that sense disease-causing agents.
Ekaterina Heldwein, Ph.D., Tufts University School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology and molecular biology, who will use structural and biophysical approaches to discover, in atomic-level detail, how herpes viruses enter their host cells.
Konrad Hochedlinger, Ph.D., Harvard Stem Cell Institute assistant professor of medicine, who will study the reprogramming of adult mouse and human cells into embryonic cells by defined factors.
Kristen C. Jacobson, Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of psychiatry, who will conduct a large, multiphase, multidisciplinary study of Chicago-area adolescents to determine the effects of social, biological, and environmental factors on individual differences in problem behaviors.
Joanna L. Jankowsky, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology senior research fellow in biology, who will develop a mouse model to study the function of unique brain cells that are regenerated throughout life and explore how their loss may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
Alan Jasanoff, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology N.C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, who will devise genetically controlled, noninvasive methods for measuring brain activity in animals.
Mark D. Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., Brigham and Women’s Hospital assistant professor of neurosurgery, who will examine the role of decreased synthesis of microRNA, a recently discovered class of molecules, in the development and aggressiveness of human cancer.
Manuel Llinas, Ph.D., Princeton University assistant professor of molecular biology and genomics, who will define how metabolic pathways in the malaria-causing organism interact with human cell pathways, as a means of discovering new targets for treatment.
Feroz R. Papa, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco assistant professor of medicine, who will develop new therapies for diabetes using molecular tools to prevent protein aggregation in insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.
Dana Pe’er, Ph.D., Columbia University assistant professor of biological sciences, who will use computational and biotechnology approaches to understand how a cell’s regulatory network processes signals and how the signal processing goes wrong in cancer.
Kathrin Plath, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, assistant professor of biological chemistry, who will study structural changes in chromosomes that underlie the development and differentiation of cells.
Michael Rape, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, who will develop an integrated set of approaches to study differences in the regulation of cell division in specific tissues.
Jody Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Huntsman Cancer Institute assistant professor of oncological sciences, who will identify signals governing the process by which dying cells are squeezed out of tissues and study the role of this process in normal cellular function as well as in tumor formation and spread.
Alan Saghatelian, Ph.D., Harvard University assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, who will develop advanced analytical chemistry approaches to characterize biomedically important enzymes.
James Shorter, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics, who will develop biochemical methods to combat diseases caused by nerve degeneration, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s.
Dorothy A. Sipkins, M.D., Ph.D., University of Chicago assistant professor of medicine, who will use live-cell imaging and targeted nanoparticles to study stem cell and tumor microenvironments in the bone marrow.
Eva M. Szigethy, M.D., Ph.D., Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, who will use inflammatory bowel disease as a model for investigating the interactions between the brain, gut, and immune system in how adolescents cope with chronic illness.
Derek Toomre, Ph.D., Yale University assistant professor of cell biology, who will develop novel microscopes to analyze trafficking and signaling at the cell cortex, a structure just inside the cell membrane that is involved in mechanical support and movement.
Jing Yang, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine assistant professor of pharmacology and pediatrics, who will study how cancer cells spread to other organs, which could improve the ability to make prognoses and reveal new drug targets.
Mehmet Fatih Yanik, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who will develop microchip technologies to perform extremely fast studies of gene function in small animals to rapidly identify genetic targets for new drugs.
Note: After this news release was issued, NIH made an additional New Innovator Award to David A. Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D., Yale University assistant professor of chemistry, who will develop small molecules that direct human immune system antibodies to attack disease-causing cell types, with potential applications in the treatment of cancer and HIV infection.
Note: On September 20, 2007, the work description for Feroz R. Papa, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco was updated for accuracy at the request of the award receipient.
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