Two Groups Awarded BWF Travel Grants

Burroughs Wellcome Fund

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) uses Collaborative Research Travel Grants to facilitate biomedical research among laboratories in the US and abroad. This February, two Chemistry groups received these competitive awards.

One of the grants will support Professor Pinghua Liu and his graduate student, Jinzhao Shen, to go to Beijing to work in the laboratory of Professor Xiaoping Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They will collaborate with Professor Chen’s group to develop new anti-microbial drugs, focusing initially on new anti-malaria drugs for multi-drug resistant strains. Specifically, they will build marine natural product libraries and screen them for anti-malaria activities.

The second grant will support graduate student, Daniel Saltzberg, in the Allen Group. Mr. Saltzberg will work with Dr. Hiro Tsuruta’s group at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource to probe the specific interactions governing ligand binding in a large superfamily of metabolic enzymes. These studies will provide insight into the evolution of functional diversity in this superfamily.