Dual NIH Honors: Two Researchers Receive Pioneer and T-R01 Awards
The NIH Director's Transformative Research Projects (T-R01) and Pioneer Award programs encourage exploration of exceptionally innovative and original research ideas that have the potential for extraordinary impact. This year two awardees received the honor of being the first scientists to receive both awards in the same year.
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Treating a Parkinson's disease- like syndrome in rats using electrical stimulation of the spinal cord.
, neurobiologist and professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, will use the T-R01 Award to study dorsal spinal column stimulation as a novel alternative treatment of Parkinson's disease that is minimally invasive, easy to perform, and inexpensive. For his research under the Pioneer Award he will develop the first shared brain-controlled virtual reality environment designed to investigate brain-actuating technologies for treating neurological disorders.
Schematic representation depicting specific binding of genomic loci by Zinc Finger proteins, and light-tunable modulation of gene expression.
, pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, is a molecular biologist with interests in protein engineering and molecular recognition. His Pioneer Award research will allow him to pursue developing more efficient methods for the generation, alteration, and differentiation of pluripotent stem cells. These broadly applicable approaches should accelerate the use of human stem cells for modeling of biological systems and for regenerative molecular medicine. His research under the T-R01 Award with fellow team members
Paola Arlotta, Ph.D. at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School and
Feng Zhang, Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology will identify and apply new technologies that use molecular regulators to regenerate specific components of the nervous system and treat neurodegenerative diseases.
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