Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research

Last updated

The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, first awarded in 2015, is a prize conferred by the United States National Academy of Sciences. The award recognizes significant advances in convergence research, defined as work integrating scientific disciplines, and is presented for achievements that are possible only through such integration. [1] The winner is presented with a medal and a $350,000 cash prize. [2]

The inaugural prize was awarded to Chad A. Mirkin in 2015 "for impressively integrating chemistry, materials science, molecular biology, and biomedicine in the development of spherical nucleic acids and new types of nanostructures that are widely used in the rapid and automated diagnosis of infectious diseases and many other human diseases—including cancers and cardiac disease—and in the detection of drug-resistant bacteria." [1]

The winner in 2016 was Stephen R. Quake "for his innovative technological advances in microfluidics and genomics that made possible new non-invasive diagnostic procedures to detect at the single cell and single molecule levels a variety of disease conditions, such as brain tumors and the rejection of transplanted organs, as well as the prenatal diagnosis of genetic diseases." [1]

The prize was awarded to Frances H. Arnold in 2017 "for her pioneering directed molecular evolution strategies, used worldwide to optimize the functions of enzymes and to engineer cells to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources." [1]

The 2018 prize, for convergence research that benefits human health, was won by Joseph M. DeSimone. [1] As of 2023 no further prizes were listed on the National Academy of Sciences Web site. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlos Bustamante (biophysicist)</span> Peruvian-American scientist

Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shi Yigong is a Chinese biophysicist who serves as founding and the current president of Westlake University since April 2018.

The Sackler Prize can indicate any of the following three awards established by Raymond Sackler and his wife Beverly Sackler currently bestowed by the Tel Aviv University.

Raymond Sackler was an American physician and businessman. He acquired Purdue Pharma together with his brothers Arthur M. Sackler and Mortimer Sackler. Purdue Pharma is the developer of OxyContin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chad Mirkin</span> American chemist

Chad Alexander Mirkin is an American chemist. He is the George B. Rathmann professor of chemistry, professor of medicine, professor of materials science and engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of chemical and biological engineering, and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at Northwestern University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Arnold</span> American chemist, Nobel laureate

Frances Hamilton Arnold is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes.

Allied Academies is a reportedly fraudulent corporation chartered under the laws of North Carolina. Its postal address is in London, United Kingdom. It presents itself as an association of scholars, with supporting and encouraging research and the sharing and exchange of knowledge as its stated aims. The organization consists of 30 affiliate academies, which provide awards to academics and publish academic journals both online and in hard copy for members. Since 2015 the organization has been listed on Jeffrey Beall's list of "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". It is in a partnership with OMICS Publishing Group which uses its website and logo. In 2018, OMICS owner Srinubabu Gedela declared that he had informed the Nevada court that Allied Academies was a subsidiary of OMICS International. During a conference in 2018, they falsely listed a prominent chemist among its organizing committee who had not agreed to this and was not affiliated with Allied Academies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Huda Zoghbi</span> Lebanese scientist

Huda Yahya Zoghbi, born Huda El-Hibri, is a Lebanese-born American geneticist, and a professor at the Departments of Molecular and Human Genetics, Neuroscience and Neurology at the Baylor College of Medicine. She is the director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute. She became the editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience as of 2018.

The NAS Award in Molecular Biology is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "for recent notable discovery in molecular biology by a young scientist who is a citizen of the United States." It has been awarded annually since its inception in 1962.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aviv Regev</span> Bioinformatician

Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Gruebele</span>

Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently James R. Eiszner Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is the principal investigator of the Gruebele Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Quake</span> American scientist, inventor and entrepreneur

Stephen Ronald Quake is an American scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. He earned his B.S. in physics and M.S. in mathematics from Stanford in 1991 and his D.Phil. in physics from Oxford University in 1994 as a Marshall Scholar. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and the effects of knots on polymers. He did his postdoctoral work at Stanford in single-molecule biophysics with Steven Chu. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology at the age of 26, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. He moved back to Stanford University in 2005 to help launch a new department in Bioengineering, where he is now the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics. From 2006 to 2016 he was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynne E. Maquat</span> American biochemist

Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist whose research focuses on the cellular mechanisms of human disease. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. She currently holds the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and of oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Professor Maquat is also Founding Director of the Center for RNA Biology and Founding Chair of Graduate Women in Science at the University of Rochester.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Shamir</span> Israeli professor of computer science (born 1953)

Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don W. Cleveland</span>

Don W. Cleveland is an American cancer biologist and neurobiologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clare Waterman</span>

Clare M. Waterman is a cell biologist who has worked on understanding the role of the cytoskeleton in cell migration. Waterman is a Distinguished Investigator, Chief of the Laboratory of Cell and Tissue Morphodynamics, and Director of the Cell and Developmental Biology Center at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda MD, USA. Waterman has received several awards and honors, including the Sackler International prize in Biophysics, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and the Arthur S. Flemming Award for Public Service. In 2018, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She currently serves on the editorial boards of eLife, Current Biology and Journal of Microscopy.

Sue Biggins is an American cell biologist who studies kinetochores and the transfer of chromosomes during cell division. Her team isolated kinetochores from cells, enabling them to be studied separately under laboratory conditions. They also discovered that tension helps kinetochores to attach to microtubules and move from the mother cell to the daughter cells when cells divide. The methodology and concepts she developed for yeast kinetochores are being adopted in laboratories around the world. Biggins was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) in 2018.

Yan Ning is a Chinese structural biologist and the founding dean of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. She previously served as the Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University where her laboratory studied the structural and chemical basis for membrane transport and lipid metabolism.

Anurag Agrawal is an Indian pulmonologist, medical researcher, Dean of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, and the former director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a CSIR institution. Known for his studies on lung diseases, Agrawal has been a senior fellow of the DBT-Wellcome Trust. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Medical Sciences in 2014. He is also a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology which he received in 2015 and the 2020 Sun Pharma Science Foundation award in Medical Sciences.

Tuomas Knowles is a British scientist and Professor of Physical Chemistry and Biophysics at the Department of Chemistry and at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is the co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Prof. Knowles is a co-founder of four biotechnology companies: Fluidic Analytics, Wren Therapeutics, Xampla and Transition Bio. He was also the Cambridge Enterprise Academic Entrepreneur of the year in 2019.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 8 May 2023.
  2. "2017 NAS Awards in Physical Science and Engineering". National Academy of Sciences. 24 January 2017. Retrieved 3 October 2018.