The American Crystallographic Association (ACA) has elected Bruce Foxman, Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, as a member of the 2020 class of ACA Fellows. The ACA recognized his leadership of the solid-state chemistry research community and his research in topotactic relationships, solid-state dimerization and polymerization, and polymorphism. Foxman has also contributed extensively to the development of new methods for X-ray crystal structure determination. Bruce joined the Brandeis faculty in 1972 and is still research-active and also collaborating with many colleagues at Brandeis and elsewhere. He is a superb teacher (2009 Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching) and has developed widely-used downloadable tutorials on Symmetry and Space Groups and An Introduction to X-ray Structure Determination for High School Students.
Bruce Foxman Elected American Crystallographic Association Fellow
Hedstrom Receives NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award
Brandeis University chemical biologist Lizbeth Hedstrom received one of nine Director’s Transformative Research Awards this year from the National Institutes of Health under its High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program. The 5-year, $3.5 mil grant will support the development of new methods for drug design relying on targeted protein degradation. This emerging strategy has several potential therapeutic advantages over traditional approaches, including the development of more potent, longer acting, drugs.
The rational design of ‘degraders’ has focused almost exclusively on degradation induced when the target protein is modified with ubiquitin. In contrast, Hedstrom will be developing ubiquitin-independent strategies.
Former Marder Student Receives Prestigious Award
Photo: NCBS
A former graduate student from Eve Marder’s lab has received the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2020. Vatsala Thirumalai was a graduate student in the Marder lab from 1996 to 2002. She received her PhD in Neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2002.
Thirumalai was one of twelve researchers to receive India’s highest science award. She is a faculty member in the Biochemistry, Biophysics and Bioinformatics department at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Her lab is focused on neural circuits that control movement during development and adulthood in animals.
The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is awarded by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to Indian scientists below the age of 45 for outstanding research in seven fields—Biology, Chemistry, Environment Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine and Physics.
After receiving her degree from Brandeis, Vatsala did post-doctoral fellowships in Neuroscience at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY and the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.
More info: CSIR Announces Awardees of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2020, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize 2020: 12 researchers receive India’s highest science award.
Hagan and Fraden Elected APS Fellows
Seth Fraden
Michael Hagan
Michael F. Hagan, Professor of Physics and of Quantitative Biology and Seth Fraden, Professor of Physics have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS)
The fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one’s professional peers for outstanding contributions to physics. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership is recognized by this honor. The 2020 Fellows will be added to the APS Fellow Archive and formally recognized at the annual meeting of the unit through which they were elected.
Alum, Past Postdoc Receive Awards from Breakthrough Prize Foundation
Netta Engelhardt. photo: MIT
Lisa Piccirillo. photo: Quanta Magazine.
Lisa Piccirillo, a recent Brandeis postdoc and Netta Engelhardt, a Brandeis undergraduate alumni have received two awards from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. While the Breakthrough Prizes are intended to help scientific leaders gain financial freedom, the New Horizons award and the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize focus on young scientists early in their careers.
The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize is awarded to early-career women mathematicians. Lisa Piccirillo received this prize for her work in resolving the Conway Knot problem. Piccirillo was a postdoc working with Daniel Ruberman, Professor of Mathematics, from 2019 until her recent appointment as Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Netta Engelhardt, is part of a group that received the 2021 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Netta and three other scientists were awarded for their research in calculating the quantum information content of a black hole and its radiation. Engelhardt is currently an Assistant Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a 2011 graduate who majored in Physics. She received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship prior to graduating from Brandeis.
Meet the Science UDRs at the Ultimate Science Navigation Event (9/23)
At The Ultimate Science Navigation event TOMORROW (9/23), students can collaborate with the science UDRs to learn about the different offerings in the sciences, how to navigate each major/minor, what each major/minor has to offer, all with an emphasis on exploring the intersections between different programs in the sciences. We will have UDRs representing biochemistry, biology, neuroscience, chemistry, physics, and biophysics!
Students can join in the morning on Zoom from 9:30-10AM, or for the rest of the day through the new Brandeis science community Slack workspace to discuss their questions related to the majors with the UDRs! Email Lance Babcock (lbabcock@brandeis.edu), Maggie Wang (maki@brandeis.edu) or the other science UDRs for the Zoom link and Slack workspace link.
