The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Dr. Emily Balskus one of the two 2020 recipients of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is NSF's highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher who is 40 years or younger or not more than 10 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree, by December 31 of the year of the nomination. The award funds the recipient's research in any field of science or engineering. This year, each awardee will receive a $1 million grant over a five-year period for further advanced study in his or her field.
Dr. Balskus is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on delineating the relationships between microbiomes and their hosts. It has led to the ability to take control of newly discovered chemical reaction pathways in microorganisms, so as to develop new routes for making organic molecules that are of great value to the energy, biomedical, and industrial communities.
This research has led to methods for identifying and isolating molecules containing cyclopropane rings and demonstrating that they cause DNA damage upon organism exposure to toxins, which has been linked to cancer; unprecedented chemically-guided genome mining approaches that have led to the discovery of choline utilization genes, characterization of the structures and functions of associated key enzymes, and the design of small molecule inhibitors of these enzymes that are being pursued as tools and therapeutics; and the identification of gut microbes and their enzymes that metabolize the L-DOPA (3,4-dihydroxylphenylalanine)widely utilized for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, with the discovery of small molecules that increase L-DOPA bioavailability.
Dr. Balskus has received recognition for her work from a diverse group of professional and technical societies through a variety of awards, including the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award (2020), the Laureate in Chemistry of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists (2019), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2018) and the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (2018) from the American Chemical Society, being named an HHMI-Gates Faculty Scholar (2016), receiving an NSF CAREER Award (2015), being named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review (2014), and receiving a Sloan Research Fellowship (2014). Furthermore, her contributions have been honored by lectureships and have been identified as being at the cutting edge through leadership roles in international conferences, which include giving the Saltman Award Lecture at the Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference (2019) and being co-organizer of the 2019 Keystone Conference on chemical and biological considerations of the gut microbiota. Her work has been featured in Nature Communications, Science, and other major scientific journals.
Dr. Balskus deems mentoring of students and outreach to rising female scientists as integral components of her role as an educator and scientist, as evidenced by her leading activities in the scientific and general communities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
