Skip to main content

w00t!!!


Two Faculty Members Named Packard Fellows

Two Caltech faculty members have been awarded Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. Biologist Alexei Aravin and astronomer John Johnson each were awarded $875,000, to be distributed over five years.

"I'm very excited about this fellowship," says Aravin, an assistant professor of biology. "It will allow my lab to pursue new, ambitious goals that are difficult to fund using traditional sources."

Aravin studies RNA molecules, which encode the information contained in genes to help create proteins. His lab is probing the mechanisms that determine the stability and fate of RNA. He's also trying to figure out how noncoding RNA—which doesn't encode information but nevertheless plays crucial roles in the cell—functions and is produced.

Johnson's research focuses on discovering and characterizing planets around other stars. "My broad goals," he says, "are to gain a better understanding of planet formation, place our solar system in a broader galactic context, and eventually find places in the galaxy where other life forms might reside." He plans to use the money to help support postdocs in his research group and to start a visitor program in which scientists from other institutions are invited to brainstorm and collaborate.

Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy, was meeting with a student when he got the phone call notifying him of the award. "I don't remember my exact reaction, but it certainly startled the poor student," he says. "I spent the rest of the day grinning like an idiot."

According to the Packard Foundation, the fellowships were established in 1988 to allow promising professors to pursue research early in their careers with few funding and reporting constraints. Each year, presidents from 50 universities each nominate two early-career professors for the fellowship. A panel of scientists and engineers then select 16 fellows. To date, there have been more than 400 professors who have received Packard Fellowships. Aravin and Johnson join 26 members of current and past Caltech faculty who have been named Packard Fellows.

Written by Marcus Woo
http://www.caltech.edu/content/two-faculty-members-named-packard-fellows
Caltech Media Relations 

Comments

Anonymous said…
Congratulations! Great news. :)
Evgenya said…
Excellent! a hearty Mazel Tov!

Popular posts from this blog

back-talk begins

me: "owen, come here. it's time to get a new diaper" him, sprinting down the hall with no pants on: "forget about it!" he's quoting benny the rabbit, a short-lived sesame street character who happens to be in his favorite "count with me" video. i'm turning my head, trying not to let him see me laugh, because his use and tone with the phrase are so spot-on.

The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke  which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims. I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to d

Reader Feedback: Whither Kanake in (white) Astronomy?

Watching the way that the debate about the TMT has come into our field has angered and saddened me so much. Outward blatant racism and then deflecting and defending. I don't want to post this because I am a chicken and fairly vulnerable given my status as a postdoc (Editor's note: How sad is it that our young astronomers feel afraid to speak out on this issue? This should make clear the power dynamics at play in this debate) .  But I thought the number crunching I did might be useful for those on the fence. I wanted to see how badly astronomy itself is failing Native Hawaiians. I'm not trying to get into all of the racist infrastructure that has created an underclass on Hawaii, but if we are going to argue about "well it wasn't astronomers who did it," we should be able to back that assertion with numbers. Having tried to do so, well I think the argument has no standing. At all.  Based on my research, it looks like there are about 1400 jobs in Hawaii r