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“I relished the chance to return to a broad, liberal arts university with a strong medical and public health component,” Quave says. “I love talking daily to leading scholars from different fields and being close to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The caliber of Emory undergraduates was another draw. More than one hundred undergraduates have trained in her lab, which has published more than one hundred articles, many of them written by undergraduates. Quave is thrilled by the career successes of former lab members—from jobs in medicine to pharmacology research to biotech start-ups. But she’s also committed to cultivating her students’ awareness and appreciation of plants. “I try to give my students the tools to make more informed decisions about how they live their lives,” Quave says. “Their choices affect both their own health as well as that of the planet.”—Carol Clark
The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines by Cassandra Quave, published in October 2021, is available through most major booksellers.
TRACTOR BEAM FOR TUMORS Ravi Bellamkonda, Emory University provost and biomedical scientist, has received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award for his crosscutting work using electrical fields to treat a particularly aggressive pediatric cancer. Bellamkonda’s five-year grant supports a project to use low-voltage electrical fields to induce cancer cells to migrate out of the tissues they have invaded: a strategy he calls a “tumor tractor beam.” The approach could be particularly valuable for diffuse cancers, indicating that the malignant growth has spread to multiple areas of an organ or the body. Bellamkonda’s team will test the strategy with a type of pediatric tumor called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG); this tumor arises in the brainstem and is not amenable to surgery. Early work on this concept was supported by Ian’s Friends Foundation, an Atlanta-based foundation whose mission is to find cures for pediatric brain tumors. The team includes Tobey MacDonald from Emory Pediatrics and Nassir Mokarram from Emory Neurosurgery, Warren Grill from Duke Biomedical Engineering, and Johnathan Lyon 17PhD, who led this project as a graduate student and scientist in the Bellamkonda lab. SCIENCE MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE Emory physician-scientist Colleen Kelley was awarded the HIV Medicine Association’s 2021 Award for Excellence in HIV Research. Kelley’s work focuses on the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among sexual and gender minorities, as well as disparities in HIV prevention and intervention uptake. In announcing the award, the HIV Medicine Association said Kelley “has a deep understanding of laboratory-based research, clinical trials, and epidemiologic research and has been a tireless champion for underserved populations in both clinical care and research participation.”
THEORETICAL INVESTIGATIONS The Simons Foundation has named Ilya Nemenman one of its 2021 Simons Investigators, among the most prestigious awards for a theoretical research scientist. The Emory College of Arts and Sciences professor of physics and biology has been instrumental in helping Emory become a global research leader in theoretical and modeling approaches to living systems. The recognition for Nemenman, a pioneer in developing theories to model and make quantitatively precise predictions of biological information processing systems, comes with $100,000 annually for five years. The award allows him to add postdoctoral researchers and students to Emory’s highly collaborative Theory and Modeling of Living Systems initiative.
HEALTH CARE INNOVATORS This fall, two Emory researchers received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award that supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, received the award for using brain-machine interfaces to help restore critical functions like communications to paralyzed patients, including those with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Candace Fleischer, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, received the award for her proposal to use magnetic resonance imaging in new ways to study metabolic disease. Pandarinath and Fleischer each received a $1.5 million grant to pursue their research over a five-year period.
WINTER 2021
EMORY MAGAZINE
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