ӳý core member receives prestigious award to fund interdisciplinary research
Image courtesy of NIHӳý core member Aviv Regev is among 16 researchers to receive the 2008 Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in support of innovative biomedical or behavioral research. Regev, a computational biologist who is also an assistant professor at MIT, will apply her $2.5 million, 5-year grant to explore how biological regulatory networks that control cell function change over time during development, disease, and evolution.
The Pioneer Award is designed to honor researchers at any career level whose novel work spans a diverse range of scientific disciplines or is at such an early stage and so cutting-edge that it may not receive funding through traditional channels. In addition, the work must be distinct from what is currently being done and hold the promise of significantly impacting the future directions of research in the field.
Over the next five years, Regev will be able to carry out new research that will combine her expertise in computation and informatics with hands-on laboratory experiments. She and her colleagues will examine how biological networks change over time, including transient changes that occur over short periods, such as the course of disease or an organism’s lifespan, as well as permanent changes that take place over thousands and millions of years of evolution. The work will involve studies in yeast and in humans, and examine both normal development and disease.
“This is the kind of work that a grant on this scale enables you to do: truly ambitious and comprehensive work that brings together both computational and experimental approaches,” Regev said.
Regev has also worked in the biotechnology sector and developed a novel representation language for biomolecular processes while working on her doctoral degree. She has been at the ӳý of MIT and Harvard since 2006 and her work has focused on regulatory networks, or the molecular means that determine which genes get switched on when and to what degree. Regulatory networks control everything from a cell’s rate of metabolism to its growth, behavior, and structure. These complex molecular networks show amazing flexibility, and can reconfigure themselves as an organism develops, as a disease progresses, or as environmental changes force a species to adapt during evolution. Regev’s proposed work will explore a novel hypothesis: that these network changes on both short and long timescales may have the same molecular targets.
Regev’s previous research — including developing a catalogue of each gene’s history in a large number of fungal genomes and characterizing the different states of the malaria parasite in human blood — have also been ambitious, but the Pioneer Award will help her take the next pressing step down a new research path. To help answer questions about the targets of regulatory network changes, Regev will be studying mammalian systems and will examine changes over time as diseases like cancer progress. Her goal is to have both a wet and a dry lab — meaning one that is experimental and one that is computational — and to operate both at the highest level.
Additional winners of this year's NIH Director's Pioneer Award include Alice Ting, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT and associate member of the ӳý, and Alexander van Oudenaarden, an MIT physics professor.
NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni commended Regev and her fellow award recipients for their ingenuity and courage to take on new and vital questions in biomedicine and behavioral science. “Nothing is more important to me than stimulating and sustaining deep innovation, especially for early career investigators and despite challenging budgetary times. These highly creative researchers are tackling important scientific challenges with bold ideas and inventive technologies that promise to break through barriers and radically shift our understanding,” said Zerhouni.
Before joining the ӳý, Regev worked as a fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University. Her work on understanding regulatory networks has garnered her the 2008 Overton Prize of the International Society of Computational Biology, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship.
