2005 Pioneer Award recipient Dr. Erich Jarvis

How can NIH help extraordinarily innovative scientists explore ideas that have the potential for unusually high impact? One way is through the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award program, part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni announced the newest cohort of Pioneer Award recipients at a ceremony in Masur Auditorium on Sept. 19.

“This is a diverse group of forward-thinking investigators whose work could break new ground in many areas of medical research,” he said. “The awards give them the intellectual freedom to pursue exciting new research directions and opportunities in a range of scientific fields, including computational biology, immunology, stem cell biology, nanotechnology and drug development. And reflecting the nature of some of today's most cutting-edge research, a number of the projects have a strong interdisciplinary thread."

	NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni (r) and NIGMS director Dr. Jeremy Berg (c) met with all three cohorts of award recipients during the lunch break of the second annual NIH Director's Pioneer Award Symposium.

The 13 awardees, who will each receive $2.5 million in direct costs over 5 years, are:

• Dr. Kwabena A. Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, who will develop a specialized hardware platform for the detailed simulation of the inner workings of the brain's cortex.
• Dr. Arup K. Chakraborty, Robert T. Haslam professor of chemical engineering, chemistry and biological engineering at MIT, who will combine the application of theoretical methods rooted in statistical physics and engineering with experiments to determine principles governing the emergence of autoimmune diseases.
• Dr. Lila M. Gierasch, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who will investigate protein folding in the complex environment of a cell and explore how diseases may arise from folding mistakes.
• Dr. Rebecca W. Heald, associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who will study how cells scale the size of their internal organelles.
• Dr. Karla Kirkegaard, professor and chair of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, who will identify and validate targets for antiviral drugs leading to suppression of the growth of drug-resistant variants of dengue, West Nile, hepatitis C and polio viruses.
• Dr. Thomas J. Kodadek, professor of internal medicine and molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who will develop a chemistry-based approach to monitor and manipulate the immune system.
• Dr. Cheng Chi Lee, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, who will explore the physiology of suspended animation in non-hibernating mammals.
• Dr. Evgeny A. Nudler, professor of biochemistry at the New York University School of Medicine, who will develop new types of antimicrobial drugs and vaccines to treat and prevent drug-resistant infections.
• Dr. Gary J. Pielak, professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who will study proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases at the atomic level inside living cells.
• Dr. David A. Relman, associate professor of microbiology and immunology and of medicine at Stanford University, who will explore the roles in health and disease of microbial communities indigenous to humans.
• Dr. Rosalind A. Segal, associate professor of neurobiology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who will focus on identifying the way complex sugars work to maintain neural stem cells in the developing and adult brain.
• Dr. James L. Sherley, associate professor of biological engineering at MIT, who will work to develop routine methods for the production of human adult stem cells from liver, pancreas, hair follicles and bone marrow.
• Dr. Younan Xia, professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, who will develop nanomaterials as new tools for understanding and controlling cell communication.

	2004 Pioneer Award recipient Dr. Homme Hellinga (c) of Duke University Medical Center made a point about his work to 2005 awardees Dr. Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and Dr. Hollis T. Cline (far r) of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

NIH selected the 2006 Pioneer Award recipients through a special application and evaluation process. After NIH staff determined the eligibility of each of the 465 applicants, the first of three groups of distinguished experts from the scientific community identified the 25 most highly competitive individuals in the pool. The second group of outside experts then interviewed the 25 finalists on campus in August.

The advisory committee to the NIH director performed the final review and made recommendations to Zerhouni based on the evaluations by the first two groups of outside experts and programmatic considerations.

"In addition to supporting outstanding research, the Pioneer Award is an innovation in its own right. It is one way...of funding scientists with highly promising ideas that may be too novel, span too diverse a range of disciplines or be at too early a stage to fare well in the traditional peer review process," Zerhouni noted.

"I am particularly pleased that enthusiasm for the Pioneer Award led a record number of NIH components to contribute their own funds to the program this year, allowing us to support six more awards than the seven provided in the NIH Roadmap budget," he added. The 11 components that contributed funding were NCI, NHLBI, NIAID, NIBIB, NIDCR, NIGMS, NINDS, NIA, NIDA, NCCAM and the Office of Research on Women's Health. Biographical sketches of the 2006 Pioneer Award recipients are available at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/pioneer/Recipients06.aspx.