Chan and Katok Elected Members of American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Moses Chan	Anatole Katok

Moses Chan, an Evan Pugh Professor of Physics, and Anatole Katok, the Raymond N. Shibley Professor of Mathematics, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the highest academic honors in the United States. The two Penn State faculty members are among 178 new Fellows and 24 Foreign Honorary Members elected to the academy this year. Current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

“I am honored to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals to the nation’s oldest and most illustrious learned society,” said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots. “These new members have made extraordinary contributions to their fields and disciplines through their commitment to the advancement of scholarly and creative work in every field and profession.”

Chan is director of Penn State’s Center for Nanoscale Science, one of twenty-eight research centers in the National Science Foundation’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program. His research is aimed at answering, or raising, fundamental questions about matter in its various phases or states such as liquid, solid, and gas. He is particularly interested in phase transitions—the conditions under which a material changes from one phase to another—in quantum fluids, in reduced dimensions, and in the presence of disorder. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish have proven to be useful in understanding a wide variety of problems in condensed-matter systems undergoing phase transitions. Recently, Chan received international acclaim for his discovery, with graduate student Eun-Seong Kim, of a new phase of matter, a “supersolid” form of helium-4 with the extraordinary frictionless-flow properties of a superfluid.

Chan previously has been honored with a Senior Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1982, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, selection as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1987, the Fritz London Prize in Low-Temperature Physics in 1996, and election as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2000.

Katok is a specialist in the theory of dynamical systems, which forms the mathematical foundation for the field of nonlinear dynamics and for the theory of chaos. He is the author or co-author of several leading texts and monographs, including two acclaimed works with Boris Hasselblatt, Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems and A First Course in Dynamics with a Panorama of Recent Developments. He is the founding editor of the leading journal in the field, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems and, jointly with Hasselblatt, is the editor of two volumes of the Handbook of Dynamical Systems. “Katok and Hasselblatt have been referred to as the Rodgers and Hammerstein of dynamical systems,” according to a Tufts University promotion of their work.

Katok is the director of the Center for Dynamics and Geometry in the Department of Mathematics and the chairman of scientific advisory board for the Penn State Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters, which assembles undergraduate mathematics majors from all over the country for an intensive one-semester immersion that features specially-designed courses, seminars, and research-oriented projects. He received Penn State’s 2002 Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, which honors tenured faculty who have excelled both in teaching at the graduate level and in supervising the thesis work of graduate students. Earlier in his career, he received the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize and, more recently, he was honored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science with its prestigious Invitation Fellowship to spend part of the 2003-2004 academic year lecturing and conducting research in Japan.

Booker Receives PECASE Award from President Bush

	Squire Booker

Squire J. Booker, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, has been recognized as one of 57 of the country’s most promising scientists and engineers by President George W. Bush with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Booker received the award at the White House in recognition of his research on enzyme reactions, including his work with an enzyme involved in the synthesis of fatty acids, which led to his discovery of a reaction unprecedented in solution chemistry. He also was honored for his leadership in education, including his distinguished teaching. Examples of his achievements include his bringing aspects of his research into the curriculum for the Introductory Biochemistry course and encouraging underrepresented minority students to perform undergraduate research. In fact, undergraduates played a significant role in obtaining the preliminary data upon which the scientific portion of the award was based.

Booker is one of 20 researchers supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to receive the award. Nominees were selected from junior faculty members who had received grants from NSF’s 2002 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, the agency’s most prestigious award for new faculty members. CAREER awards provide five years of funding to support the work of those considered most likely to become academic leaders. Only 140 of the 2,900 CAREER award winners since 1996 subsequently have received the PECASE award, according to the NSF.

Booker earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Austin College in 1987 and his doctoral degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He then was appointed a National Science Foundation NATO Fellow at Rene Descartes University in Paris, France, in 1994 and a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in 1996 before joining the Penn State faculty in 1999.

Brandt Receives Pierce Prize

Niel Brandt

The American Astronomical Society has awarded its Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy to Niel Brandt, professor of astronomy and astro-physics at Penn State. The prize honors young astronomers for their research based on measurements of radiation from an astronomical object.

Brandt was recognized with the award for his outstanding contributions to X-ray astronomy. His publication list includes more than 130 articles in refereed journals, and his teaching subjects include black holes, high-energy astrophysics, and active galaxies. His work has “played a key role in increasing our understanding of the accretion process around massive black holes,” the Pierce citation states.

Brandt uses the X-rays emitted by the gas swirling around a black hole as a “flashlight” to “X-ray” the material in the galaxy’s nucleus. By analyzing the spectra and variability of the X-rays, he hopes to determine the precise mechanisms by which X-rays are emitted and to measure the rates at which supermassive black holes are swallowing the matter that surrounds them. He also is using X-ray data to discover new active galactic nuclei. His most recent research is with the Chandra Deep Field North pencil-beam X-ray survey, in which he has created the most sensitive image to date of the distant X-ray universe.

Brandt’s previous honors include a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1996, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1999, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000.

Brandt earned his bachelor’s degree in physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and his doctoral degree in X-ray astrophysics at Cambridge University in 1996. He was a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1996 to 1997, when he joined the Penn State faculty.

The Newton Lacy Pierce Prize is awarded annually for outstanding achievement to an astronomer who has not yet attained 36 years of age in the year designated for the award. Recipients must be residents of North America or a member of a North American institution.

Team Receives $1-Million Grant for Nanowires Research

Kristen Fichthorn	Christine Keating	Theresa Mayer	Darrell Velegol

A team of four Penn State faculty members has received a four-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) program.

The team consists of Darrell Velegol, assistant professor of chemical engineering and principal investigator of the NIRT grant; Kristen Fichthorn, the Merrill R. Fenske Professor of Chemical Engineering; Christine Keating, assistant professor of chemistry; and Theresa Mayer, associate professor of electrical engineering. Their grant is titled, “Bottom Up Assembly of Metal and Semiconductor Nanowires: Fundamental Forces to Nanoelectronic Circuits.”

Velegol says the team will examine new methods for assembling nanowires in an accurate and controlled manner, rather than in a random and uncontrolled manner that is common in today’s techniques. Keating adds, “one of these approaches is to use short strands of DNA as a selective ‘glue’ to direct the location of each tiny electrical component in the assembly of circuits from the bottom up.”

Currently, nanocircuits are constructed using what Velegol describes as a “top-down” process where machines build the circuits. “The current process is similar to how we would build a house,” Velegol explains. “We would take studs and nails and pound them together to create the house’s frame. On a very basic level, that’s how we assemble nanocircuits right now—the process requires a builder.”

Through a bottom-up approach, the team hopes to get the nanowires to assemble themselves into a circuit through the use of “smart” particles. “Going back to our house analogy, it would be like throwing the wood, nails and other materials for the house into a ditch and having the house build itself,” he says.

The problem with processing nanoparticles is that the attractive forces on that tiny scale trigger the random aggregation and clumping of the nanoparticles.

“We’re working to control the attractive forces to prevent random aggregation, and then we’re using complementary DNA strands to direct assembly at the locations where we want it. The circuitry proposed in our grant is based on binary decision diagrams, but the bottom-up methods we are developing can be extended to many types of circuits,” he says.

Velegol says he hopes the research will also lead to new methods of building computers, other electronics, and sensors. “The aim is to build a completely new type of circuit—as novel as the bottom-up method used to assemble it—that takes advantage of the quantum effects of nanoparticles,” he says. “Furthermore,” adds Keating, “we anticipate that what we learn here will be generally relevent to any nanoparticle assembly process.”

Keating’s lab will conduct the nanowire assembly experiments. “I am very excited to be working with this team because each of us brings complementary expertise to the project. Together we hope to be able to address the important issues in deterministic nanoparticle assembly beginning with a basic-science perspective and following through to the fabrication of simple devices.”

Ma Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Hong Ma

Hong Ma, professor of biology, has been selected as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his exceptional scholarship and significant record of publication.

Ma’s lab is interested in understanding plant reproductive development at the molecular level using three-dimensional light-microscopic techniques. He said he intends to use his fellowship to support his sabbatical research on plant meiosis, a reproductive process.

In 2002, Ma and his research team discovered a new gene shown to be essential for pollen production in flowering plants. “Plant breeders eventually may be able to use this information to control pollination in important agricultural crops such as wheat, rice, and soybeans, where such control previously has not been feasible,” Ma said. A paper describing the team’s discovery of the gene was published in the journal Genes and Development.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of John Simon Guggenheim, their son, who died in 1922. It is one of the most prestigious awards given each year to artists, scholars, scientists, and educators to support their scholarly work. Ma was among 185 Fellows selected this year out of a field of 3,200 applicants. Guggenheim Fellowship recipients represent applicants in 79 different fields from the natural sciences to the creative arts. The 2004 Fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities.

Ma currently serves on the National Science Foundation Developmental Mechanism Program Panel as associate editor of the journal Plant Molecular Biology. In 2000, he was appointed one of only 33 Chinese-born scientists worldwide to serve as an Overseas Assessor for the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In this role, he assists the academy in its evaluation of grant proposals, review of job candidates, and consultation on scientific initiatives and direction.

Ma received his bachelor’s degree in biology and biochemistry summa cum laude from Temple University in 1983. He received his doctoral degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988.

Rao Recognized for Scientific Impact; Has New Research Institute Named in His Honor

	C. R. Rao

Calyampudi R. Rao, Emeritus Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics and director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis, has received the first Mahalanobis International Award in Statistics from the International Statistical Institute. Presented at the Fifty-Fourth Session of the International Statistical Institute, the award recognizes Rao’s lifetime of achievement in statistics.

This prize is named in memory of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who established the Indian Statistical Institute and was an Honorary President of the International Statistical Institute. The Government of India instituted this biennial prize for statisticians from developing countries to attract and inspire statisticians from across the developing world, and to motivate them to promote and develop statistical theory and its applications in real-life situations.

Rao also was awarded the 2003 Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal by the Indian National Science Academy. This award is given once every three years for “outstanding contributions to the discipline of mathematics or a related subject,” and is awarded to scientists whose impact has been felt for a considerable length of time.

Earlier in the year the Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, established a new institute named in Rao’s honor. The C.R. Rao Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science was inaugurated this spring with a symposium on “Challenges in Mathematical and Computer Sciences.”

The Rao Institute, which is intended to promote research and advanced study in the fields of mathematics, statistics, and computer sciences, will host international workshops, conferences, and symposia to highlight advances in these fields. In addition to research facilities, the institute will be home to a museum illustrating the history of mathematics and statistics and their uses in research, industry, and society.

The Rao Institute will have a dual focus on research and outreach. Scientists will undertake research in basic science and in such new areas of statistics as data mining and quality control. The Institute also will conduct special orientations for school teachers in an effort to improve the teaching and learning processes in schools.

One of the world’s top five statisticians, Rao is recognized internationally as a pioneer who laid the foundation of modern statistics, with multifaceted distinctions as a mathematician, researcher, scientist, and teacher. His contributions to mathematics and to the theory and application of statistics during the last six decades have become part of graduate and postgraduate courses in statistics, econometrics, electrical engineering, and many other disciplines at most universities throughout the world. Rao’s research in multivariate analysis, for example, is useful in economic planning, weather prediction, medical diagnosis, tracking the movements of spy planes, and monitoring the course of spacecraft. Technical terms bearing his name appear in all standard textbooks on statistics, including such terms as the Cramer-Rao Inequality, Rao-Blackwellization, Fisher-Rao Theorem, Rao Distance, and Rao’s Score test. A book he wrote in 1965, Linear Statistical Inference and Its Applications, is still one of the most-often-cited books in science.

Among his numerous previous awards, Rao was honored in 2002 by President George W. Bush with the National Medal of Science, the highest award given to an American scientist for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. He has been honored by the government of India with the Padma Vibhushan award in 2001—the country’s second-highest civilian honor—for outstanding contributions to science, engineering, and statistics; with being selected in 2000 as the namesake for a National Award to be presented to India’s outstanding young statisticians; and in 2002 with receiving from the prime minister of India the highest honor bestowed by the University of Visva-Bharati, the 2002 Desikottama award, in recognition of his “enormous contributions in the field of statistics and its applications.”

Rao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science in the United States, a Fellow of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, and a member of the Indian National Science Academy, the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, and the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Rao was born in 1920 and earned his Ph.D. and Sc.D. degrees in 1948 at Cambridge University in England. Rao came to the United States 1978 after serving as director of the Indian Statistical Institute, where he had held various research and administrative positions since 1944. In 1982 he established the Center for Multivariate Analysis at the University of Pittsburgh, where he continues as adjunct professor. He joined the Penn State faculty in 1988.

He has authored or co-authored 14 books—some of which have been translated into several languages—and more than 300 research papers. He has supervised the doctoral research of approximately fifty students, most of whom now are employed in universities and other research organizations worldwide.

Allara Receives Honorary Doctorate in Sweden

David Allara

David L. Allara, Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science, has received an honorary doctoral degree from Linköping University in Sweden.

Allara was honored for his pioneering work in the area of self-assembled monolayers. This work has spawned many applications including the development of new biomaterials and biochemical sensors. The award recognizes the importance of his contributions to the research programs at Linköping University and expresses appreciation for his collaborations and interactions with faculty and students there over the past two decades. He has lectured at workshops and summer schools sponsored by the university, and many of its researchers and students have spent time with Allara in his laboratory at Penn State. Allara’s work in self-assembled monolayers recently was recognized at the American Chemical Society National Meeting, where he received the Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Achievements in Surface Chemistry.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1959 and a doctoral degree at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1964. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University in England from 1964 to 1965 and a staff member of the Stanford Research Institute from 1965 to 1967. He was an associate professor of chemistry at San Francisco State University from 1967 to 1969. After a distinguished career at Bell Laboratories and Bell Communications Research he joined the faculty at Penn State in 1987, where he currently is involved in wide-ranging research areas involving molecular electronics, biomaterials, energy conversion and nanoscale science.

Weiss Recognized for Teaching Excellence

	Paul Weiss

Paul Weiss, professor of chemistry and physics, received the Excellence in Honors Teaching Award from the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State. The award was presented by the executive vice president and provost Rodney Erickson. Erickson acknowledged the hundreds of University faculty who serve as honors advisors, teach honors courses, and supervise honors option courses and student research theses. “These generous faculty are most remarkable for the dedication, commitment, energy, thoughtfulness, creativity, and rigor they bring to working with Schreyer Scholars,” he said.

The awards for excellence in honors advising and teaching have been presented annually by the Schreyer Honors College since 2000 to recognize outstanding faculty members at Penn State. Weiss was nominated by many of the Scholars who took his first-year general chemistry laboratory course. “Professor Weiss did an amazing job of linking fundamental chemistry principles to our daily lives. He enthusiastically showed us that chemistry is a central science,” wrote one of his students.

Weiss joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry in 1989, and was named professor of physics in 2002. He was appointed as director of Penn State’s Center for Molecular Nanofabrication and Devices in 2001. He was a visiting professor at Kyoto University in 1998 and a visiting professor at the University of Washington from 1996 to 1998.

Weiss is serving as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry from 2000 to 2005. His academic honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, the American Chemical Society Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry in 1996, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1995, and the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He earned his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in l986. He received his master’s degree in chemistry and his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

The Schreyer Honors College was founded by William A. and Joan L. Schreyer who, through a major endowment, helped Penn State reinvent honors education. The mission of the College focuses on achieving academic excellence with integrity, building a global perspective, and creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement.

Albert, Keating, and Yee Receive Sloan Fellowships

Reka Albert	Christine Keating	Ae Ja Yee

Reka Z. Albert, assistant professor of physics; Christine Dolan Keating, assistant professor of chemistry; and Ae Ja Yee, assistant professor of mathematics, have been awarded Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships in recognition of their work as young scientists engaged in cutting-edge research in their respective fields.

The Sloan Research Fellowship program awards two-year grants of $40,000 to support any research topic of interest to Fellows. This year’s 116 Fellows, from 51 universities in the United States and Canada are engaged in research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, and neuroscience.

Albert is studying the underlying network structure of complex systems such as the World-Wide Web or the cell. “The topology of this network can give us important insights into the organization of the system,” she explains. “Network modeling is based on a synthesis of experimental information available about the processes taking place in a system and leads to predictions that motivate new experiments.” Albert earned her bachelor’s degree at the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania in 1995 and her master’s degree there in 1996, then earned her doctoral degree at the University of Notre-Dame in 2001. She was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota until she joined the Penn State faculty in 2003. She now serves as a reviewer for more than 20 journals and several foundations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Albert’s previous awards include a Soros Mobility Grant in 1996 and the Shaheen Graduate School Award from the University of Notre Dame in 2001.

Keating’s research has focused on constructing functional materials from the bottom up by controlling their nanoscale and mesoscale features. “Controlling the composition of matter at these length scales,” she says, “can lead to materials with entirely new and tailorable optical, electronic, and structural properties.” She hopes such materials will find applications in medicine, biotechnology, sensors, nanoscale electronics, and a variety of other fields.

Keating earned her bachelor’s degree at St. Francis College in 1991, and her doctoral degree at Penn State in 1997. She joined the Penn State faculty in the fall of 2001. Her previous awards include a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2003 and, in 2004, both the Beckman Young Investigator Award and the Unilever Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in Colloid and Surfactant Science.

Yee’s research focuses on such mathematical topics as partition theory, q-series, enumerative combinatorics and special functions. These topics have found widespread, important uses in recent years, in areas stretching from computer science to statistical mechanics. Yee has used her breadth of knowledge to make major contributions to the elucidation of Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook and to the Alder Conjecture, which has stood for nearly half a century. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1993 at Ewha Woman’s University in Korea and both her master’s degree in 1995 and her doctoral degree in 2000 from the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. She then held teaching positions at the University of Illinois from 2001 until she joined the Penn State faculty in 2003. Her previous awards include a postdoctoral fellowship from the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation in 2000, and research grants from the U.S. Number Theory Foundation in 2002 and 2003.

The Sloan Research Program was established in 1955 and has distributed more than $103 million to an estimated 3,900 researchers. Twenty-eight former Sloan Fellows have received Nobel prizes.

Wolszczan Receives Award from Polish American Congress

	Alexander Wolszczan

Alexander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, was honored with the Polish American Heritage Award—the most prestigious award bestowed by the Illinois Polish American Congress—during the 35th Annual Polish American Heritage Celebration. The Heritage Award is given to an individual who has achieved excellence in their career and has brought great pride to Polish-American people.

Wolszczan became the first person to discover planets outside our solar system in 1992, when he used the 1,000-foot Arecibo radiotelescope to detect three planets orbiting a rapidly spinning neutron star. This discovery opened the door to the current intense era of planet hunting by suggesting that planet formation could be quite common throughout the universe and that planets can form around different types of stellar objects.
In 2002, Wolszczan was honored in Poland by having his likeness featured on a special set of postage stamps celebrating the past millennium. Also featured on the stamp was Nicolaus Copernicus—considered by many to be the founder of modern astronomy.

Wolszczan’s previous honors include the 2001 Marian Smoluchowski Medal—the highest prize awarded by the Polish Physical Society—the Gold Medal Award of the American Institute of Polish Culture in 2000, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit Award from the president of Poland in 1997, and an Annual Award from the Foundation for Polish Science in 1992. He received the Casimir Funk Natural Sciences Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America and the Beatrice M. Tinsley Award from the American Astronomical Society in 1996, and the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award from Popular Science magazine in 1994. He was awarded a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 1994, and in 1998 he was named an Evan Pugh Professor at Penn State—the highest distinction the university can bestow upon a faculty member.

Wolszczan received his master’s degree in astronomy in 1969 and his doctoral degree in physics in 1975 from Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland. Before coming to Penn State in 1992, he conducted research at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico from 1983 to 1992 as a research associate and senior research associate with Cornell University. He was a research associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences Copernicus Astronomical Center from 1979 to 1983, and was an assistant professor at the Nicholas Copernicus University from 1974 to 1979. He has held positions as visiting scientist or visiting professor at Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. He is a member of the Penn State Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry.

Wolszczan is a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union, the International Union of Radio Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and is a fellow of the World Innovation Foundation.

Peterson Receives Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

Blake Peterson

Blake Peterson, associate professor of chemistry, has received a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. This prestigious award is designed to provide external support to young faculty members during the early stages of their academic careers to assist them in continuing their high level of accomplishment in both research and education.

Peterson’s research focuses on the chemical synthesis of non-natural compounds that are designed to exhibit significant biological activity. He uses organic-chemistry techniques to prepare and identify biologically-active small molecules. One of his goals involves the synthesis of cell-surface receptors that are functionally related to natural receptors that enable protein toxins to penetrate into cells. These non-natural receptors can be directly loaded into the membrane surrounding mammalian cells to attach synthetic receptors to the cell surface. “Our synthetic-receptor-targeting strategy is an efficient method of enhancing the cellular uptake of macromolecules. In this approach, we decorate cells with chemically-defined receptors that access the molecular machinery controlling the organization of cellular plasma membranes,” Peterson says. “This technology may have applications in genetic therapy, tumor therapy, and modulation of immune responses in the treatment of human diseases.”

He also does research on the use of hormone antagonists, or hormone blockers, for use in the treatment of hormone-dependent cancers, seeking new compounds that will limit the growth of drug-resistant breast and prostate cancers. In addition to supporting his research of synthetic-receptor targeting as a novel tool for drug delivery, a portion of the award will be used to support Penn State’s Action Potential Science Experience outreach program.

Peterson’s previous awards include an American Cancer Society Research Scholar award in 2003. He also received Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Concept Awards each year from 2000 to 2004. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is an ad hoc reviewer for several scientific publications, including Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chemistry and Biology, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, the Journal of Organic Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry. He also has served as a reviewer for the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund. He has published approximately thirty scientific papers related to his research.

Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 1998, Peterson was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University from 1995 to 1998. He was a research assistant at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1992 to 1994, a research assistant and teaching assistant at the University of California in Los Angeles from 1990 to 1992, and a research assistant and teaching assistant at the University of Nevada from 1989 to 1990,

Peterson earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Nevada in 1990 and his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.