9/28/00
Linda Hicke Honored with Women in Cell Biology Award
Linda will receive this award from the American Society for Cell Biology at its annual meeting in San Francisco, Dec. 9-13. There are two awards: one for a senior scientist and one for a junior scientist. Linda will receive the junior award. She began her position as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in 1996 and is a 1998 Searle Scholar.

8/1/00
Sean O'Shea takes Directorship at Binning Family Foundation
Sean is leaving Kinship Foundation to become the Executive Director of the Binning Family Foundation in Denver, Colorado. The top priority of this new foundation will be to develop and implement programs utilizing technology for at-risk youth.

While the Searle Scholars Program seeks Sean's successor, Alison Janus, who directs other programs at Kinship Foundation, will be filling in for Sean.

Sean did a magnificent job in the Searle Scholars Program, and we wish him all the best in his new role. Sean can be contacted at sean@binningfoundation.org or 720.506.0100.

7/14/00
Peter Schultz (1985 Searle Scholar and former Advisory Board Member) is featured in a major Science article on combinatorial chemistry and the new genomics, appearing on pages 232-235 of the July 14, 2000 issue of Science.
Peter is Director of the newly created Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in La Jolla, California. As the article describes it, they aim to bring together all the available high-speed tools, such as gene chips for determining the suite of genes active in normal and diseased tissues, high-speed mass spectrometers that are essential for identifying proteins, high-speed robotics for synthesizing compounds and crystallizing large numbers of proteins for rapid structural determination, and powerful computers to make sense of all the data. Not surprisingly, Peter is described as a guy who runs at 800 miles per hour and thinks even faster. On the Searle Advisory Board we witnessed some of this speed, for Peter often was in too much of a hurry to finish sentences, so he would just say the first part and complete the sentence with da-dah, da-dah, da-dah!

6/1/00
Doug Rees, 1994 Searle Scholar, Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Doug joins eight other former Scholars who have received this, among the highest honors in American Science. Scholars previously elected are Fred Alt, Elaine Fuchs, Michael Levine, Doug Melton, Stu Schreiber, Peter Schultz, Matt Scott and Roger Tsien. Doug is also a current member of the Program's Advisory Board. Another Advisor, Joan Massague, was also elected to the NAS this year. Congratulations to you both!

6/1/00
Former Scholars Named New Investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Stephen Bell, Daphne Preuss, Ray Deshaies, Eric Gouaux, Jon Weissman, Rachel Green, Bruce Lahn, and Ruslan Medzhitov were among 48 young scientists selected for major research support. HHMI "is a medical research organization that enters into long-term research collaboration agreements with universities and other academic research organizations, where its investigators hold faculty appointments. Under these agreements, HHMI investigators and their teams, who are employees of the Institute, carry out research with considerable freedom and flexibility in HHMI laboratories located on the various campuses. This model emphasizes "people, not projects" and differs from the grants approach used elsewhere. HHMI expects to spend between $500,000 and $1 million annually for each of its new investigators, including support to the host institutions for graduate training, library resources and other needs. "

4/24/00
Jennifer Doudna, 1996 Searle Scholar, Receives the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation
Jennifer will receive the award May 3rd. The following is part of the announcement:
"The National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a Yale University professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry to receive its most prestigious prize for young researchers. Jennifer A. Doudna will be honored with the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award at a National Science Board awards ceremony on May 3 in Washington, D.C. She is only the third woman to be so honored, and is the 25th recipient of the award since its inception in 1976. Doudna's leading work in structural biology provided an answer to how RNA can act like an enzyme to catalyze specific biochemical reactions, and how polyanionic RNA forms a three-dimensional structure."

For more information and to see the medal itself, you can click on Waterman Award and go to the NSF internet announcement.

4/14/00
Geraldine Seydoux, 1997 Scholar, Receives Presidential Early Career Award
Geraldine received the award from President Clinton for outstanding work on the genes and cellular mechanisms that control germ cell specification during early embryo development. This year's awards went to 60 young researchers in various fields of science and engineering, funded by U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, the NSF, and NASA.

3/14/00
Ben Shen's Research Featured in Chemical & Engineering News
Ben Shen's work on enediyne anticancer drugs is featured in this week's Chemical & Engineering News. (Vol. 78, pp 47-49, March 13, 2000).

3/07/00
Four Searle Scholars Named to Technology Review's Top 100
Pehr Harbury, Bruce Lahn, Christopher Lee, and Jason Shear have been recognized by Technology Review as members of the TR100: The top 100 young innovators considered to have the greatest potential to have an impact on technology in the 21st century.

Technology Review released the names of 100 winners in the November/December issue of Technology Review and can be found at www.techreview.com.

Click on the following links to read the profiles of the four Searle Scholars honored with the TR100 award: Pehr Harbury,
Bruce Lahn, Christopher Lee, and Jason Shear

2/24/00
Cori Bargmann, '92 Searle Scholar, to Receive the 2000 C.J. Herrick Award from the American Assocition of Anatomists.
AAA’s Herrick Award is presented annually "to recognize young investigators who have made important contributions to the field of comparative neuroanatomy and have demonstrated remarkable promise of future accomplishments." Cori will present an award lecture entitled "Olfactory Signaling and Olfactory Behavior in C. elegans" at the AAA Annual Meeting at the San Diego Convention Center. Her award lecture will be presented on Saturday, April 15 from 5-6 p.m. To quote from the AAA announcement, "she is being recognized for two landmark research contributions. First, she proved that a specific transmembrane protein in vivo functions as an olfactory receptor. Her second key discovery is that natural variation in a G-protein-coupled receptor similar to mammalian neuropeptide Y receptors determines social behavior in C. elegans."