Alex Holehouse, PhD, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will receive the New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Holehouse is being recognized by the NIH for his work on intrinsically disordered protein regions — protein domains that play key roles in the normal function of many types of cells but that are especially challenging to study because they do not have a fixed shape.
The award funds early-stage investigators who are within 10 years of completing their final research degrees. The award is part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, which emphasizes unconventional and impactful research focused on major challenges in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. The program is supported by the NIH Common Fund, and Holehouse is one of 58 investigators who will receive a New Innovator Award this year.
Providing $1.5 million in direct costs over five years, the New Innovator Award will support Holehouse’s continued work on decoding the chemistry and physics of intrinsically disordered protein regions. Dysregulation of disordered regions has been implicated in many different diseases, yet how exactly this happens is often unclear. A better understanding of what they do and how they work could lead to new types of therapies.