James Petersson Receives CAREER Award

E. James Petersson, Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.  The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.

Petersson’s research focuses on proteins and the amino acids which make them up.  His lab has developed a unique way of tracking proteins that may someday allow them to make atomic-scale movies of protein motions.  This has very real implications, including the synthesizing of misfolding proteins in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and mad cow disease.

The NSF says of Petersson’s research, “Understanding concerted changes resulting from large numbers of non-covalent interactions is a problem not only for biochemistry, but for nearly all scientific study at the nanometer scale. In the course of developing thioamides for motional studies, a greater understanding of this relatively unexplored functional group will be obtained.”