Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center computational and molecular biologist Dr. Arvind “Rasi” Subramaniam has received a five-year, $920,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop computational models of how cells cope with stalled protein synthesis. Cells rely on proteins for all their functions, and Subramaniam’s research will shed light on how protein synthesis goes awry in diseases such as cancer.
CAREER Awards support early-career faculty poised to make important scientific advances and serve as academic role models in research and education.
“It gives us an opportunity to explore a direction we would otherwise find very hard to do with traditional funding mechanisms,” said Subramaniam, who has also obtained National Institutes of Health funding to study the same process in human cells. “The NSF is more willing to fund projects that are not directly medically relevant. It’s fantastic. A precise understanding of biology is what we want, but you can’t start with a complex disease system. This gives us a really nice way to test our intuition using rigorous computational models.”
