National Institutes of Health Recognizes DOE Scientists

Summary

NIH has announced the recipients of the highly competitive Transformative and New Innovator research grant awards. Three of the 97 new grants in these two programs are to DOE-funded scientists who will develop new applications of their advanced technologies. Wei-Jun Qian of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has made significant contributions to advancing mass spectrometry instrumentation for proteomics. The NIH New Innovator grant will enable him to seek a thousand-fold improvement in sensitivity of these experiments while increasing the speed so that a hundred or more experiments can be carried out each day on an instrument. Jerilyn Timlin of Sandia National Laboratories has developed new techniques for imaging living cells with high spatial resolution. She will use her New Innovator grant to combine imaging of the dynamics and interactions of proteins in living cells currently studied one at a time into a single, multiplexed technique capable of studying five or more proteins simultaneously. Sunney Xie of Harvard University also has pioneered techniques for imaging, in his case Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), which allows studying single molecules in complex biological systems, without having to label them to make them detectable. His Transformative research grant will enable him to extend the SRS technology to study the dynamics of lipids in living cells. These scientists have major support for their technological research from the Offices of Biological and Environmental Research and Basic Energy Sciences. Their NIH-funded research will seek new technologies that will also have applications in DOE bioenergy research.