Keating Receives Beckman Young Investigator Award, CAREER Award, and Unilever Award

25 August 2005 — Christine D. Keating, assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, has received a Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and a Unilever Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society.

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation’s Young Investigator Award program recognizes young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers whose work shows promise to open up new avenues of research in science. The Beckman Award will enable Keating to work on developing a new class of synthetic cells designed to accurately reproduce not only the lipid membrane, but also the crowded, dynamically structured interior of living cells. “Dynamic control over the subcellular localization of ions, proteins, nucleic acids, and particles is a cornerstone of cell function and has not been modeled previously in a synthetic system,” says Keating.

Keating also has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award, which the agency describes as its highest honor for new faculty, provides five years of funding to stimulate the early development of academic careers in science and engineering and to support the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education. This award will further Keating’s work with synthetic cells as test systems for understanding chemical interactions and reactivity in biological cells.

Keating will characterize the phase and partitioning behavior of a variety of mixtures of aqueous polymers and biomolecules, and will investigate the response of such systems to external stimuli. She then will use this new knowledge in the design of synthetic cells. The goal of this research is to understand the assembly toolkit of biological cells in order to redirect these tools to assemble new classes of functional materials.

In addition to the Beckman Award and NSF Career Award, Keating has received a Unilever Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry. Established in 2003 by the Unilever Corporation, this annual award recognizes and encourages fundamental work by researchers in North America who are in the early stages of their careers, especially those researchers whose work has potential industrial or commercial application. The award was presented at the 78th Colloid and Surface Science Symposium at Yale University, where Keating also presented an invited lecture, titled “Towards Functional Architectures on the Nano- and Microscale.”

Keating has published 43 scientific papers. She holds three patents related to her research, and has six additional patent applications pending. Her previous awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship in 2004, a Roberts Graduate Fellowship from the Penn State Eberly College of Science in 1996, a Henkel Corporation research fellowship from the ACS Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry in 1996, a Eugene and Jane Apple Science Graduate Fellowship at Penn State in 1995, and a Paul Berg Award in Molecular Biology in 1993. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Biophysical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the international scientific research society Sigma Xi.

Keating has served on the Faculty Think Tank Committee in the Department of Chemistry since 2004 and on the department’s Advisory Committee since 2003. She served on the Graduate Admissions Committee from 2001 to 2002, the Colloquium Committee from 2002 to 2004, the Priestley and Marker Lecture Committee in 2002 and 2003, the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Committee from 2002 to 2003, and several search committees. She was a lecturer in the High-School Teacher Training Workshops in 2002 and 2003, co-taught an Optical Microscopy Workshop as part of the Biomaterials and Biotechnology Summer Institute in 2003, and participated in a Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) Nanotechnology Camp in 2002. She also has served as a Faculty mentor for the Women In Science and Engineering Research (WISER) program at Penn State since 2002.

Keating earned her bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, in biology and chemistry at St. Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania, in 1991, having conducted undergraduate research at Syracuse University from 1989 to 1991. She earned her doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 1997 and was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemistry from 1997 to 1999. She accepted a fixed-term faculty position in the department in 1999, and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 2001.

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