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Alum is first engineer to win NIH Director's Pioneer Award
3:41 p.m., Oct. 20, 2006--University of Delaware alumnus Arup K. Chakraborty, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has received the National Institutes of Health's Pioneer Award and is the first engineer to receive the honor. The honor includes a $2.5 million grant from NIH for biomedical research. Now in its third year, the highly competitive NIH Director's Pioneer Award is a key component of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, which supports exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. Chakraborty and 12 other recipients of the 2006 Pioneer Award were selected from 465 applicants by teams of distinguished experts from the scientific community. The winners were selected from 25 finalists based on the evaluations by two groups of outside experts and programmatic considerations. “The 2006 Pioneer Award recipients are a diverse group of forward-thinking scientists whose work could transform medical research,” Elias A. Zerhouni, NIH director, said. “The awards will give them the intellectual freedom to pursue exciting new research directions and opportunities in a range of scientific areas, from computational biology to immunology, stem cell biology, nanotechnology and drug development.” Chakraborty, who earned his doctoral degree in chemical engineering from UD in 1988, will combine the application of theoretical methods rooted in statistical physics and engineering with experiments to determine principles governing the emergence of autoimmune diseases.
Noting that Chakraborty is the first engineer to ever receive the Pioneer Award, Robert C. Armstrong, Chevron Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, said, “Arup's research lies at a crossroad of the engineering, physical and life sciences. In the past few years, his research group has demonstrated that bringing together statistical mechanical approaches with engineering analyses of chemical kinetics and genetic, biochemical and imaging experiments (carried out by collaborators in medical schools) can shed light on mechanistic principles underlying the adaptive immune response to pathogens.” Last fall Chakraborty received UD's Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement, an honor bestowed upon UD graduates of the last 20 years who “exhibit great promise in their professional and public service activities.” Arup K. Chakraborty's research recently earned him election to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional distinctions in engineering. The academy recognized him for his accomplishments in applying theoretical chemistry to practical problems in immune system recognition, polymer interfaces, sensor technology and catalysis. He has coauthored more than 90 publications and delivered more than 100 invited lectures “I registered as a student at the University of Delaware two days after coming to this country,” Chakraborty, from India, said after receiving the UD citation. “The University not only taught me about science and engineering, but also about America and the principles that make this nation great. Today, as a proud American, I look back on the four years at Delaware with fondness and gratitude for teaching me about our country and instilling in me the desire to strive for excellence.” Article by Martin Mbugua
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