IDEALS II Faculty, Rein Ulijn, Receives Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award
IDEALS Faculty Rein Ulijn, director of the Nanoscience Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and Einstein professor of chemistry at Hunter College, was recently awarded $675,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study whether synthetic biomolecular systems can be engineered to learn and acquire new traits or upgrade their performance in changing environments, thus mimicking living systems. Professor Ulijn's team will dramatically streamline such complex systems by constructing simpler puzzles with much more basic versions of life's molecules as the pieces. Their systems will be built from peptides, which are simplified versions of proteins that have specific interaction tendencies that lead to spontaneous self-organization.
Congratulations, Rein!