Release date: March 11, 2008
Contact: Beverly Cox Clark at 404-712-8780 or beverly.clark@emory.edu

Emory Chemist Receives Sloan Fellowship

Emory University's Justin Gallivan, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He is among 118 young scientists, mathematicians and economists selected as 2008 Sloan Fellows, representing faculty from 64 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge.

Gallivan's research focuses on how natural systems do chemistry, and "how we can learn from it and develop the systems to do things nature hasn't thought of yet," he says. Research projects in his lab are "united by the idea that we can 'borrow from biology' to solve problems in chemistry and materials science. As such, we develop genetic tools that allow us to 'reprogram' bacteria to make new molecules and perform other complex tasks," says Gallivan.

"With support of the Sloan Foundation, we are developing new ways to discover bacteria that make molecules efficiently. We recently developed a way to make cells 'run' when a certain molecule is present. If more of the molecule is present, the cells run further. The idea going forward is to program these cells to make new molecules that we're interested in by using a technique known as directed evolution," Gallivan says.

In directed evolution experiments, Gallivan and his laboratory team make random changes to proteins in the cells and look for the cells that most efficiently produce the target molecules. In the past, measuring how well a cell produced a molecule often required expensive equipment. Gallivan's new method can determine how well a cell does chemistry by simply using a ruler to measure how far it moves. "This new method avoids expensive equipment and materials and allows us to look at millions of cells at a time to determine which ones are the best at making new molecules," he says. This basic research can lead to more efficient and greener methods to make important chemicals, such as pharmaceuticals.

Gallivan joined Emory in 2002 after earning his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and completing a National Institutes of Health fellowship at Caltech. He is a founding member of Emory's Center for Fundamental and Applied Molecular Evolution led by David Lynn, professor of biomolecular chemistry and chair of Emory's chemistry department

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955, initially in only three scientific fields: physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Since then, 35 Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their fields; and 14 have received the Fields Medal, the top honor in mathematics. Although Sloan Research Fellowships in economics began only in 1983, since then Sloan Fellows have accounted for 8 of the 13 winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, generally considered the top honor for young economists.

Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow's institution. Once chosen, Sloan Research Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them, and they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.

For a complete list of winners visit www.sloan.org.

Emory University (www.emory.edu) is one of the nation’s leading private research universities and a member of the Association of American Universities. Known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities, Emory is ranked as one of the country's top 20 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.

Subscribe to News@Emory RSS feeds for automatic updates of the latest news at Emory.

Back