ON CAMPUS
RESEARCH
ONE OF THE BEST IN BIOMIMETICS Chemistry professor awarded prestigious national honors for groundbreaking research
PHOTO BY MARY ANDERSON
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Rutgers University–Camden professor has been honored by both the White House and the U.S. Army for outstanding early career research. Jinglin Fu, an associate professor of chemistry, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor that a beginning scientist or engineer can receive in the United States, at a special ceremony during the summer in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was awarded a $1 million grant with the Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Army Research Office. That grant funds a graduate student and a postdoctoral student to do research in Fu’s lab on the Rutgers–Camden campus, as well as paid summer research internships for Rutgers–Camden undergraduates. “This is an important award to support my lab’s research of biomimetic systems, as well as exploring new directions in biomolecular assemblies and functions,” Fu said. Biomimetics is an interdisciplinary field that applies principles from engineering, chemistry, and biology to the synthesis of materials, synthetic systems, or machines that have functions that mimic biological processes.
FU
Fu, a member of the Rutgers– Camden Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, joined the university faculty in 2013. He earned his doctorate in chemistry at Arizona State University and master’s and undergraduate degrees in chemistry at Zhejiang University in China. His work in biomimetics strives to design solutions to human challenges, ranging from diagnostics and drug delivery to the production of high-value
chemicals and smart materials that can improve efficiency and save resources. One of the potential applications of Fu’s research is to develop smart biosensors for diagnosing and monitoring disease, detecting risk, and deciding which therapies will work best for individual patients. “There is tremendous potential in biomimetic research to change the world for the better in many ways,” Fu said. 5
