HHMI Selects New Investigators

AWARDS

Many chemists are in new crop of researchers to receive funding

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Md., has announced the selection of 43 scientists as new HHMI investigators. Of those selected, nearly half are involved in chemistry and biochemistry—as broadly defined.

"We more than doubled our number of chemists," HHMI President Thomas R. Cech says. "If you include some of the other scientists who are not trained as biologists, I figure we tripled nonbiological scientist investigators."

Cech sees the results as a sign of the times. "The interface between physical science and biomedicine is a very vibrant area where there is a huge impact factor, so universities and medical schools were wise to think of more than just biology faculty when they were asked for nominations."

HHMI will invest more than $300 million in additional support for these new investigators over the next seven years. Each scientist will receive support of about $1 million per year.

New investigators in chemistry-related disciplines are James Bardwell, U of Michigan; David Bartel, MIT; Bonnie L. Bassler, Princeton U; Albert Bendelac, U of Chicago; Ronald Breaker, Yale U; Zhijian Chen, U of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; Joseph DeRisi, UCSF; Taekjip Ha, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Gregory J. Hannon, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Oliver Hobert, Columbia U; Linda C. Hsieh-Wilson, Caltech; Dorothee Kern, Brandeis U; David R. Liu, Harvard U; Karolin Luger, Colorado State U; Milan Mrksich, U of Chicago; Joseph P. Noel, Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Stephen R. Quake, Stanford U; Brenda A. Schulman, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; Kevan Shokat, UCSF; Thomas Tuschl, Rockefeller U; Yi Zhang, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Xiaowei Zhuang, Harvard U.