Vanderbilt University biophysicist Gregor Neuert, Ph.D., M.Eng., is among 50 recipients of the 2014 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award. Each award provides up to $1.5 million in direct research support over five years.
The award, established in 2007 by the NIH Common Fund, supports early-career investigators who propose “highly innovative” projects that could have great impact on biomedical or behavioral science.
Neuert, assistant professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics and of Biomedical Engineering, uses quantitative single-cell/single molecule experiments, genetics and mathematical models to understand how coding and non-coding genes are regulated and how signals are transmitted across cell membranes.
Last year he and his colleagues reported in Science magazine on predictive models they developed for complex gene expression and signaling pathways in budding yeast. The modeling should aid efforts to better understand and treat human diseases such as cancer, they concluded.
Neuert, who was trained in Germany, was recruited to Vanderbilt in 2012 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He is the fourth Vanderbilt scientist to receive a New Innovator Award. The others are Sean Davies, Ph.D. (2007), Melanie Ohi, Ph.D. (2008), and Qi Zhang, Ph.D. (2011).
The 2014 recipients will be honored in December at the High Risk-High Reward Research Symposium at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.
