IN THE LAB
Susan Forsburg
Norman Arnheim
ON THE
CUTTING EDGE USC Dornsife faculty garner high marks and grants from the National Institutes of Health. BY SUSAN ANDREWS Sergey Nuzhdin
USC DORNSIFE’S Department of Biological Sciences earned exceptionally high priority scores from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the past year, which will translate to generous funding for their diverse, cutting-edge research projects. An unprecedented five professors in molecular and computational biology (MCB) will receive grants from the NIH: Myron Goodman, Susan Forsburg, Norman Arnheim, Sergey Nuzhdin and Frank Alber. All will be funded by NIH including several who have received specific dollar amounts and project timeframes for their proposals. According to the NIH’s Web site, each scored grant application is assigned a single, global priority score that reflects the proposed project’s scientific and technical merit based on consideration of the five review criteria: significance, approach, innovation, investigator and environment. The proposals were enthusiastically received by NIH with four of the five receiving percentile rankings ranging from 2 to 7 percent. The proposal submitted by Myron Goodman, professor of biological sciences and chemistry, resulted in a more than $2 million award for a biochemical study on error correction in DNA synthesis that focuses on the enzymes called polymerases. Goodman explained that DNA polymerases replicate parental DNA so that when a cell divides,
FACULTY IN
Frank Alber
“It would seem prudent to regulate the access of such low fidelity polymerases to DNA to avoid generating a mutational catastrophe.” —MYRON GOODMAN, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND CHEMISTRY
16 | USC Dornsife Magazine
F. ALBER PHOTO BY PAMELA J. JOHNSON; S. NUZHDIN PHOTO BY MAX S. GERBER; M. GOODMAN PHOTO BY PHIL CHANNING; S. FORSBURG PHOTO BY ERIC O’CONNELL; N. ARNHEIM PHOTO BY BRIAN MORRI
Myron Goodman