NIH director announces 2006 Pioneer Award ...( Bethesda Md. -- Elias A. Zerhouni M....)

Bethesda, Md. -- Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, today named 13 recipients of the 2006 NIH Director's Pioneer Award.

Now in its third year, the Pioneer Award is a key component of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. The program supports exceptionally creative scientists who take highly innovative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.

"The 2006 Pioneer Award recipients are a diverse group of forward-thinking scientists whose work could transform medical research," said Zerhouni. "The awards will give them the intellectual freedom to pursue exciting new research directions and opportunities in a range of scientific areas, from computational biology to immunology, stem cell biology, nanotechnology, and drug development."

The 2006 awardees, who will each receive $2.5 million in direct costs over five years, are:

• Kwabena A. Boahen, Ph.D., Stanford University associate professor of bioengineering, who will develop a specialized hardware platform for the detailed simulation of the inner workings of the brain's cortex.

• Arup K. Chakraborty, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biological Engineering, who will combine the application of theoretical methods rooted in statistical physics and engineering with experiments to determine principles governing the emergence of autoimmune diseases.

• Lila M. Gierasch, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and chemistry, who will investigate protein folding in the complex environment of a cell and explore how diseases may arise from folding mistakes.

• Rebecca W. Heald, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, associate professor of molecular and cell biology, who will study how cells scale the size of their internal organelles.