Funding for the future
Five young and six established Harvard faculty members have received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under two programs designed to stimulate innovative and transformative research whose potentially high reward comes with high risk, which makes the researchers unlikely to win more traditional grants. Six faculty members, working on three separate projects, were named recipients of the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Project Award Thursday (Sept. 30). The awards are aimed at “truly daring” projects by scientists rethinking the way science is conducted, according to the NIH. “Complex research projects, even exceptionally high-impact ones, are tough to get funded without the necessary resources to assemble teams and collect preliminary data. The TR01 awards provide a way for these high-impact projects to be pursued,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins. One grant was given to Sunney Xie, Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Xiaowei Zhuang, professor of chemistry and chemical biology...