News Briefs

Two Tech Professors Win NIH New Innovator Award

September 24, 2009

Two Georgia Tech professors have been honored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for work that celebrates creativity and innovation among young and promising researchers.

Dr. Melissa Kemp of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Dr. Christine Payne of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry are the first Georgia Tech faculty members �“ and first in Georgia - to receive the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

The award provides $1.5 million in research funding - $300,000 a year for five years �“ to each early career investigator honored. Now in its third year, the 2009 NIH New Innovator Award will be presented to 50 individuals to recognize their potential to produce major impact on broad, important problems in biomedical and behavioral research.

Kemp is being recognized for research that utilizes engineering methods to analyze complex biochemical networks. Specifically, she is studying how oxidative environments influence immune cell function. One of her goals is to develop computational models that can predict responses to drug interventions for inflammatory disease and cancer.

"I am thrilled and honored to receive this award at an early stage of my career,” Kemp said. “Young researchers often feel pressure to conduct ‘incremental science’ in order to acquire funding. The grant provides my lab the financial freedom to explore unconventional ideas as part of our research efforts.”

Payne’s honor is in recognition for her research targeting and delivering nanoparticles to living cells and the development of microscopy methods to image dynamic events inside cells. Her research has promising applications in the arena of drug and gene delivery along with displaying potential to further understand the fundamental functions of the cell.

“This award provides a great opportunity to focus on the science of nanoparticle-cell interactions and the development of new fluorescence microscopy methods,” Payne said.

While both Kemp and Payne have received the award for their individual achievements, the two are also involved in a joint collaboration that combines microscopy, modeling and biochemical analysis in an effort to understand the intracellular environment.

The NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards were announced today. Kemp and Payne are both in Bethesda, Maryland, to accept the honor.

More information on the New Innovator Award is at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator. For descriptions of the 2009 recipients’ research plans, see http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/newinnovator/Recipients09.asp.

For more information Contact Don Fernandez (Phone: )