Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell Final Round of Awards Tops $1.3M
Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announce awards of $1,320,000 to nine interdisciplinary teams in the final year of Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell, an initiative launched in 2018 to spark collaborative research that could advance fundamental understanding of chemical machinery and reactions in the intact cell.
The 24 individual awards of $55,000 will go to 21 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States and Canada.
“The high quality, creative, and blue-sky ideas that came out of this year’s Chemical Machinery of the Cell is a testament to the Scialog process,” said Moore Foundation Science Program Officer Gary Greenburg. “Bringing together young researchers from different disciplines for several days of intense conversations produces truly novel research directions that can lead to new scientific discoveries with long-lasting benefit to society.”
Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format supports research by stimulating intensive interdisciplinary conversation and community building around a scientific theme of global importance. Teams of two or three Fellows who have not previously collaborated compete for seed funding for high-risk, high-reward projects based on the innovative ideas that emerge at the conference.
“The purpose of Scialog is to launch multidisciplinary collaborations between early career researchers who have not previously collaborated to pursue novel lines of research,” said Senior Program Director Richard Wiener. “With proof of principle, these teams’ initial research positions them to be competitive for further significant funding from federal agencies or private philanthropies.”
The following Chemical Machinery of the Cell teams will receive 2021 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards:
Julien Berro, Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, and Cell Biology, Yale University
Alexander Green, Biomedical Engineering, Boston University
Intercepting the Cell’s Hidden Signals via Peptide-Activated RNA Switches
Caitlin Davis, Chemistry, Yale University
Lars Plate, Chemistry and Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University
Structure-Function of Enzyme Filaments: Regulators of Cell Metabolism in Space and Time
W. Seth Childers, Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh
Stephen Fried, Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University
Ross Wang, Chemistry, Temple University
Toward an Atlas of All Biomolecular Condensates
W. Seth Childers, Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh
Elizabeth Read, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Irvine
Haoran Zhang, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University
Putting Bacteria to Sleep: Establishing an Artificial Circadian Clock
Maria Kamenetska, Chemistry and Physics, Boston University
Jan-Hendrik Spille, Physics, University of Illinois at Chicago
Lu Wang, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University
The Butterfly Effect in Cellular Phase Separation: from Molecular Interactions to Emergent Behavior
Jan-Hendrik Spille, Physics, University of Illinois at Chicago
Stephen Yi, Biomedical Engineering & Oncology, University of Texas at Austin
Visualizing Inheritance through the Lens of Phase Separation
Stephanie Gupton, Cell Biology and Physiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alexis Komor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego
Yan Yu, Chemistry, Indiana University
Elucidating the Polygenic Origins of Schizophrenia: Linking Protein Trafficking to Synapse Function
Ronit Freeman, Applied Physical Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lydia Kisley, Physics and Chemistry, Case Western Reserve University
Laura Sanchez, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Cruz
Stretching Reality to Discover the (un)Knowns
Stephen Fried, Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University
Tania Lupoli, Chemistry, New York University
Wenjing Wang, Chemistry and Life Sciences Institute, University of Michigan
Decoding Host-Pathogen Molecular Cross-talk via Unbiased Multiplex Profiling
The final meeting of the Chemical Machinery of the Cell initiative, held virtually October 7-8, 2021, brought together 51 Fellows from a variety of disciplines and interests to discuss challenges and gaps in current knowledge, build community around visionary goals, and form teams to write proposals.
Keynote speaker Rigoberto Hernandez, the Gompf Family Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE), invited Fellows to “dream better science” in imagining novel projects to tackle in his inspiring keynote, “Middle Scales of the Cell.”
He walked participants through the kinds of projects previously funded through the initiative, where fertile areas for new discoveries may lie, and encouraged them to leverage different approaches and methods to stimulate groundbreaking science.
New ideas come from diversity and including different voices, questioning the scientific status quo, and not being afraid to make mistakes, he said. “If we don’t fail, we’ll never succeed.”
Two days of lively breakout sessions followed, led by Hernandez and other facilitators including Rommie Amaro, University of California, San Diego; Holly Goodson, University of Notre Dame; Martin Gruebele, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Neil Kelleher, Northwestern University; Gang-yu Liu, University of California, Davis; Erika Matunis, Johns Hopkins University; Cathy Murphy, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Paul Selvin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Participants coalesced into teams around emerging ideas, considering what their collaborations might look like, what novel problems they might tackle together, and what additional skills they might need on their teams. Proposals were submitted a week following the conference.
Including the 2021 awards, a total of more than $3.5 million has been awarded through the Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell initiative. Team awards were made after in-person meetings in 2018 and 2019. A mini-meeting, including discussions but no proposal writing, was held virtually in 2020 to encourage continued group engagement and dialogue.
RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer said the goals of the Scialog program go beyond funding new research.
“We hope the meetings throughout this initiative have helped create a lasting network and the opportunity for different people from different fields at different institutions to meet and collaborate,” he said. “We will be watching to see how this network we have tried to nurture, as well as their continued conversations, will enhance their work going forward.”
About Research Corporation for Science Advancement: Research Corporation for Science Advancement, founded in 1912, is a private foundation that funds basic research in the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, physics, and related fields) at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.
About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation fosters path-breaking scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements and preservation of the special character of the Bay Area. Visit Moore.org or follow @MooreFound.
