François Baneyx
2006 Catalyst Article
Another edition of Catalyst means that another year has gone by in a hurry and it seems to me that it was only yesterday that I wrote for our newsletter. Much however has happened over this period. I remain site director for the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (www.nnin.org) and, with Prof. Castner stepping down, I will serve as acting director for the UW Center for Nanotechnology until our international search for a new director concludes. We were also very fortunate to hear from NSF that the UW was awarded a prestigious Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC) to complement ongoing efforts in the nanobiotechnology arena. The $6.5 million Genetically Engineered Materials Science & Engineering Center (GEMSEC) is led by Prof. Sarikaya (from the materials science and engineering department) and involves both myself and Dan Schwartz from chemical engineering. GEMSEC’s mission—to revolutionize materials science and engineering by adapting, utilizing, and integrating the knowledge and tools of biological sciences—is a very exciting one and we are looking forward to this challenge.
Two group members graduated this year. In March, I-Ting (Geoffrey) Chow earned his PhD for dissecting the function of the two ClpB isoforms, a remarkable molecular chaperone that is able to unfold misfolded and aggregated species to give them a second chance at proper folding. Geoffrey did not stray too far from UW and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In July, Elyse Shapiro was awarded a PhD for her work on the use of stress promoters for the detection and categorization of antimicrobial compounds and for identifying and characterizing mutants of firefly luciferase that emit light in the orange and red regions of the spectrum (see Figure). Elyse was assisted in her screening efforts by Connie Lu, the recipient of a highly competitive Mary Gates undergraduate fellowship. Elyse is planning to take a postdoctoral or industrial position in the Seattle area after a well-deserved summer break. Dr. Sriram Sastry, who worked first on the structure-function relationship of Hsp31 (a new chaperone identified by our lab) and next on the DURINT nanobiotechnology project, left to take a position at the University of Missouri. We will miss him along with Haixia Dai, one of Dan Schwartz’s graduate students who spent quite a bit of time in our labs on the DURINT project. Haixia has joined Cambrios a small start-up company working in the area of molecular biomimetics.
Worth mentioning are the achievements of Dan Allred who is co-supervised by Prof. Schwartz and myself. Dan not only won second place in the Center for Nanotechnology contest to produce educational materials for high school students, but he made the cover of the April 2005 issue of Nano Letters and this cover was selected for the commemorative poster at the 230th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Washington, DC. Way to go Dan!
