Volume 12, Number 3, 2004
Kristi L. Kiick, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, has been awarded a 2003 Beckman Young Investigator Award by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.
The highly prestigious award provides research support to the nation's most promising new faculty in the chemical and life sciences, and Kiick was one of 20 Beckman Young Investigators named for 2003. She is the first faculty member to receive the Beckman Young Investigator Award while at the University.
This is the second major award Kiick has received recently. Earlier in 2003, she received a five-year, $420,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program award, which recognizes and supports the nation's "teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century."
The goals of the Beckman Young Investigator Program include "fostering the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science."
Kiick's innovative research on novel protein materials for directing biological responses is aimed at the design and synthesis of advanced biopolymeric materials.
"My group's research seeks to exploit and expand the synthetic strategies used by nature for the production of well-defined molecules that may be useful in medical applications and in the construction of materials and devices," Kiick says. Her work also takes advantage of the molecular recognition processes employed by nature to assemble novel hydrogels for use in drug delivery and tissue engineering applications.
Using concepts and techniques from molecular biology, chemistry, biochemistry and materials science, Kiick's research is aimed at constructing sequences of amino acids--the building blocks of proteins--with properties tailored to specific applications.
She says she hopes to produce macromolecules that can expedite the development of new biomaterials and therapeutic strategies that might help fight such diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.
After earning her bachelor of science degree in chemistry at UD in 1989, Kiick went on to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Georgia and a doctorate in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts.
She joined the UD faculty in 2001, saying she was drawn to return to her alma mater by the opportunities it offered in biotechnology research and collaboration as well as in teaching.
In addition to the Beckman and NSF awards, Kiick is the recipient of a 2002 University of Delaware Research Foundation Award, a 2002 Unilever Award and a 2001 Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award.
Since 1991, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation of Irvine, Calif., has presented 176 Young Investigator awards totaling $35 million to scientists who are conducting their research programs at prominent universities and research institutes across the nation. The Beckmans, through the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, have contributed approximately $350 million to the advancement of research and education. Their gifts have benefited a number of scientific and medical institutions throughout the United States.
--Neil Thomas, AS '76