Two Rice bioengineering professors win NIH Director’s New Innovator awards

By Alyssa Hu     10/17/23 11:31pm

Jerzy Szablowski and Julea Vlassakis won the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator awards for their individual research projects. The award, announced Oct. 3, recognizes early-stage investigators who demonstrate relevant, creative and influential project proposals that align with the NIH mission.

Szablowski’s research focuses on engineering released markers of activity, a novel method for mapping gene expression in the brain. While surgeries were traditionally required to monitor such processes, RMAs, which travel in the bloodstream, enable a non-invasive approach with high sensitivity and precision that can provide information on 100 cells or fewer. 

Vlassakis’s project studies proteins in cancer cells at the single-cell and single-molecule levels. Her research aims to understand what makes certain cancer cells in a tumor treatment-resistant or able to metastasize throughout the body.

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“Human cells are small, around half the width of a human hair, so we design measurement devices that are equally small to reduce the dilution of proteins during the measurement so the proteins can be detectable,” Vlassakis said.

Vlassakis said her inspiration for this project originates from her Ph.D. and postdoc training in the Herr lab at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed methods for studying proteins, including interacting proteins, at the single-cell level. 

“[I] learned about the somewhat neglected area of childhood [and] young adult cancer research that could benefit from new tools to study protein interactions that appear to be especially important in these diseases,” Vlassakis said. 

Szablowski was out of town and unable to be reached for comment.

Ramesh Ramamoorthy, Rice’s executive vice president for research, said he is excited to see the scientists getting this recognition, as it serves as an investment for the future. 

President Reggie DesRoches said that having two Rice award recipients in one year speaks to the quality of faculty at Rice. Last year, Rice had 13 faculty members who won the National Science Foundation Award, and this year Rice has 12, according to Ramamoorthy.

DesRoches said these accomplishments highlight Rice’s new strategic focus of research. 

“I want to see Rice elevate its research profile and its impact on the world,” DesRoches wrote in an email to the Thresher.

Vlassakis said the resources and culture at Rice have contributed to the recognition of her work. 

“The Ph.D. students that I work with have played an integral role in shaping the research directions of the New Innovator Award projects,” Vlassakis said. “In particular, my first Ph.D. student, Jocie Baker, helped me understand the critical importance of the 3D cell environment on Ewing sarcoma [a rare bone cancer] biology.”

Undergraduate students Vidal Saenz and Ryan Wang, who work in the Szablowski Lab, shared similar sentiments about the workspace culture. 

“I’ve always felt welcome from the day I joined, and have always received endless support from the entire lab,” Saenz, a McMurtry College senior who majors in neuroscience and worked at the lab during the past summer, said. 

“I joined [the lab] in the middle of the pandemic my freshman year, and I was very fortunate,” Wang, a Lovett College senior who’s worked for the lab for three years now, added. “It [serves as] a testament to the lab culture, they were willing to let me join the lab in the middle of a pandemic, as a first semester freshman, with [little] experience. It’s a very welcoming culture and also very innovative.”

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