Inside Stanford Medicine - September 24, 2012
Two teams of scientists led by Stanford professors have received Howard Hughes Medical Institute Collaborative Innovation Awards. Four other groups of researchers also received funding; HHMI will distribute $40 million total to the six teams over the next four years to carry out potentially transformative research.
One of the teams is led by Axel Brunger, PhD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology and of neurology and neurological sciences. His team received a $6 million, four-year award to develop new methods of sample delivery, data collection and analysis in order to study structures of nanometer or micron-scaled crystals of biological molecules using the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Brunger's collaborators include William Weis, PhD, professor of structural biology and of molecular and cellular physiology, as well as scientists at UC-Berkeley, UCLA and the California Institute of Technology.
Also receiving a $6 million award is a group led by Liqun Luo, PhD, professor of biology. Luo's team plans to develop a suite of tools for mapping neuronal connections in the complete mouse brain. They will then use those tools to study the organization of neural circuits and how they are affected by specific neurotransmitters, to ultimately better understand how sensory perception works.
Luo collaborates on this project with Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford as well as an HHMI Early Career Scientist winner. His collaborators also include scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and Hebrew University.
