Two win NIH awards for innovative research

Photo: Ed Boyden (left)and Alan Jasanoff, Associate Members of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research,each receive a prestigious NIH award for conceptual and technological breakthroughs. Photo courtesy of Donna Coveney, MIT

Cambridge, MA, September 20, 2007 -- The National Institutes of Health have honored two Associate Members of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT for their "exceptionally innovative" research.

Professors Ed Boyden and Alan Jasanoff are among 29 nation-wide winners of New Innovator Awards, which are reserved for new investigators. They will each receive $1.5 million.

"Novel ideas and new investigators are essential ingredients for scientific progress, and the creative scientists we recognize with...[the] NIH Director's New Innovator Awards are well-positioned to make significant—and potentially transformative—discoveries in a variety of areas," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni.

"The conceptual and technological breakthroughs that are likely to emerge from their highly innovative approaches to major research challenges could speed progress toward important medical advances," he added.

According to the NIH, Ed Boyden, who is the Benesse Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and in the Media Lab, will invent and study new methods of controlling the neural circuits that malfunction in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

"I'm really happy to have gotten this award in my first year here at MIT, for our work on correcting intractable neuropathologies," commented Boyden. "It's going to allow my lab to launch some extremely cool projects, and to pursue them with a sense of freedom and adventure."

Alan Jasanoff, the N.C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering with appointments in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, will devise genetically controlled, noninvasive methods for measuring brain activity in animals.

Jasanoff said, "It's wonderful to receive this generous award from the NIH, which will greatly facilitate our efforts to create 'informatic-scale' approaches for studying the neural mechanisms of behavior."

This is the first group of New Innovator Awards, which is part of an NIH Roadmap for Medical Research initiative that tests new approaches to supporting research.