Author: Kelly Wiese Niemeyer

The annual Dr. Adel A. Yunis Awards for Research Excellence recognize outstanding postdoctoral fellows, house staff or students conducting basic research in molecular hematology. This year’s recipients are Cara Lunn Shirai, PhD, and Juhi Bagaitkar, PhD.

Himadri B. Pakrasi, PhD, received a $49,448 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the “Indo-U.S. Workshop on Synthetic and Systems Biology” being held this November in New Delhi. Pakrasi is the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor and director of the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES).

Mark Watson, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and immunology, and Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, professor of medicine, have received a five-year, $1.47 million grant from the National Cancer Institute for research titled “Genomic Harbingers of Brain Metastasis in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”

Two psychology researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have received a $620,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the project “Preschoolers’ Use of Statistical Learning to Discover Spelling and Reading Conventions Prior to Formal Schooling.”

Bo-Ruei Chen, PhD, postdoctoral research scholar in the (Barry) Sleckman Lab, has received a three-year, $167,346 fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research titled “Pathways that Preserve Genome Stability during Antigen Receptor Gene Assembly.” …

Douglas Chalker, PhD, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded $170,000 from the National Science Foundation to continue work on his project, “DNA Elimination Mechanisms in Tetrahymena.”

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received a four-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for her work titled “XPS: FULL: FP: Collaborative Research: Taming Parallelism: Optimally Exploiting High-throughput Parallel Architectures.”

Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a commission from Chamber Music America, the national network of chamber music professionals, to compose a piece for the New York-based duo New Morse Code.

The St. Louis Rams have selected Virginia Braxs, senior lecturer in Romance languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences, as a recipient of the NFL Hispanic Heritage Leadership Award.

Raj Jain, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, was selected to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Alumni Association, among other honors.