First-Annual Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell
The first-annual Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell meeting drew 48 new Scialog Fellows to the innovative process of open dialog and the formation of competitive teams – along with 10 distinguished discussion facilitators.
“We hope this first meeting on this topic yields a crop of outstanding team proposals, which will make our job of determining who receives funding very challenging,” Research Corporation President Daniel Linzer told the group.
The unique Scialog format limits formal presentations and devotes the vast majority of the conference to small breakout discussions to identify risky, blue-sky ideas for new lines of research and form new collaborative interdisciplinary teams to pursue these ideas. Significant time is devoted to team proposal writing for seed funding to support newly formed teams of Fellows who have never before collaborated and typically not even met before Scialog.
This four-day process yielded research proposals from 24 teams on cutting-edge topics at the interface of chemistry and cell biology, particularly focused on better imaging, simulating and ultimately understanding of chemical processes in the living cell. RCSA Senior Program Director Richard Wiener said the high quality of proposed projects promises to make selection of about half a dozen projects for funding very challenging. The Scialog Advisory Committee will be making funding recommendations in the next few weeks for projects which will start in early 2019.
The meeting, attended by a total of 78 people, was held in Tucson, Arizona, October 18-21. It was jointly sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, and the National Institutes of Health.
“We chose to focus on chemical machinery of the cell because we believe this critical area of science requires major breakthroughs in fundamental understanding of chemical processes in the living cell that will lead to a new era of advancements in cell biology,” noted Richard Wiener, Research Corporation senior program director, and Gary Greenburg, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation program officer. “We believe these breakthroughs can be accelerated by chemists, biologists, engineers, and physicists working collaboratively on novel, high-risk projects, particularly with theorists and experimentalists combining efforts.”
Also attending the meeting as observers were program officers and representatives from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, Murdock Charitable Trust, Flinn Foundation, Washington Research Foundation, and the Science Philanthropy Alliance.
Keynote speakers at the conference were Rommie Amaro, professor and Shuler Scholar in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego; and Neil Kelleher, the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Professor of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences, and Medicine, Northwestern University.
In her talk, “Predicting Chemistry in a Cellular Context,” Amaro discussed how data-centric and physics-based computation is poised to play a key role in turning islands of experimental data into a continuous landscape of interdisciplinary and cross-scale collaborations and knowledge.
Predicting Chemistry in a Cellular Context from Research Corporation on Vimeo.
In his talk, ”Domesticating the Human Proteome,” Kelleher sought to stimulate thinking and discussion about how we can better regularize human biology at the protein level, including the major challenge of how to assign function to proteins and their post translational modifications present within cells.
Domesticating the Human Proteome from Research Corporation on Vimeo.
The conference’s senior discussion facilitators included Amaro and Kelleher as well as Kathy Franz, Duke University; Judith Frydman, Stanford University; Holly Goodson, Notre Dame University; Rigoberto Hernandez, Johns Hopkins University; Gang-yu Liu, University of California, Davis; Katrina Miranda, University of Arizona; and Martin Gruebele and Cathy Murphy, both of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
The Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell booklet contains a list of Scialog Fellows who attended the conference.
