New Investigator Grants

The New Investigator Grant seeks to spur innovative new research and advance the careers of new investigators who are working on cutting-edge life sciences research at Massachusetts research institutions.

New Investigator Awards – 2009
Institution	Researcher	Title of Research	Award
Boston University Medical Center	Dr. Christopher Gabel	The study of neural regeneration in C. Elegans using femtosecond laser surgery and advanced optical neurophysiology	$200,000 over two years
Brandeis University	Dr. Satoshi Yashida	How cells respond to stress?	$200,000 over two years
Immune Disease Institute, Children’s Hospital	Dr. Sun Hur	Structural and kinetic investigations of the mechanism for self vs non-self RNA discrimination by RIG-I	$200,000 over two years
Harvard College	Dr. Tobias Ritter	New pharmaceuticals and diagnostics by late-stage fluorination	$200,000 over two years
Harvard University	Dr. Briana Burton	Mechanisms of nucleic acid transport across membranes	$200,000 over two years
Harvard School of Public Health	Dr. Matthias Marti	Establishment of a high throughput screen focused on preventing the development of gametocytes, the form of malaria that mediates transmission	$200,000 over two years
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary	Dr. Konstantina Stankovic	Functional role and therapeutic implications of osteprotegerin secretion by the auditory nerve	$200,000 over two years
Massachusetts General Hospital	Dr. Raul Mostolavsky	The chromatin factor SIRT6 is a master regulator of glucose homeostasis	$200,000 over two years
Northeastern University	Dr. Mark Niedre	Optical tomographic sensing and enumeration of rare circulating cells in vivo	$180,256 over two years
University of Massachusetts Medical School	Dr. Jeffrey Bailey	Dissecting the role of human copy number variation in severe malaria	$200,000 over two years

New Investigator Awards – 2008
Institution	Researcher	Title of Research	Award
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center	Dr. Wenyi Wei	Dissection of the signaling pathways controlling the destruction of the Mdm2 oncoprotein	$300,000 over three years
Boston University	Dr. Hatice Altug	Development of multiplexed, ultra-sensitive, label-free and rapid biosensing technologies for proteomics and virus detection applications	$276,187 over three years
Broad Institute	Dr. Alexander Meissner	Characterizing the pluripotent state through integrative genomic analysis	$300,000 over three years
Harvard Medical School	Dr. Thomas Bernhardt	New strategies for identifying antibiotic targets	$300,000 over three years
Massachusetts General Hospital	Dr. Jorge Mora	Teaching lymphocytes where to go: Implications for intestinal immunity and inflammation	$300,000 over three years
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Dr. Laurie Boyer	Investigating how chromatin organization in embryonic stem cells influences cell fate specification	$300,000 over three years
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Dr. Jeroen Saeij	Molecular characterization of toxoplasma kinases involved virulence	$300,000 over three years
Tufts Veterinary School	Dr. Christopher Schonhoff	Role of S-nitrosylation in hepatic bile acid transport	$196,525 over three years
University of Massachusetts Amherst	Dr. Jesse Mager	Functional assessment of epigenetic regulatory genes in vivo	$295.732 over three years
University of Massachusetts Lowell	Dr. Xingwei Wang	Miniature label-free biosensing probes for rapid detection of virus, bacteria, and cells	$299,934 over three years
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research	Dr. Iain Cheeseman	A molecular toolkit for analysis of the human kinetochore	$300,000 over three years