Chemist Catalina Achim Receives Prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship
PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University chemist Catalina Achim has received a prestigious 2006 Sloan Research Fellowship Award for her exceptional promise to create new knowledge by pursuing research on the incorporation of metal ions into peptide nucleic acid (PNA), a synthetic analog of DNA.
The two-year, $45,000 fellowship will allow Achim, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Mellon College of Science, to expand her research on using PNA as a scaffold for metal ions and to delineate the factors that control the formation and stability of such metal-containing structures.
"This fellowship will allow me to further my work toward harnessing the information storage ability of metal-containing PNAs and eventually to build molecular-scale devices tiny replicas of today's electronic circuit components, such as wires, diodes and transistors and to explore possible biological applications of these metal-containing nucleic acids," said Achim.
"Catalina's recognition by the Sloan Foundation speaks to her outstanding scientific and teaching abilities," added Hyung J. Kim, professor and head of the Department of Chemistry. "She is a brilliant junior faculty member who represents the future of our department."
Achim is one of 116 outstanding young scientists nationwide receiving the award this year. Sloan Research Fellowships are also awarded in neuroscience, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and physics.
Like DNA, PNA takes the shape of a double helix with base pairs forming the core of the molecule. Achim developed a way to replace the core of base pairs inside PNA with different chemical groups that bind to specific metals. She was the first scientist to report the construction of these novel structures based on PNAs and containing metal ions. Since this breakthrough, she has synthesized PNAs with a variety of ligands and metal ions to broaden the molecules' range of thermal stability and electronic properties. Recently, she has shown that the binding of metal ions can mediate the formation of PNA duplexes from single strands of PNA that are only partly complementary. This result opens new opportunities to create functional, three-dimensional nanosize structures such as molecular-scale electronic circuits, which could reduce by thousands of times the size of today's common electronic devices.
Achim also has been named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, and she received the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for new faculty members, the Faculty Early Career Development Award, in 2004.
"Sloan Research Fellowships were created by Alfred P. Sloan Jr. in 1955 to provide crucial and flexible funds to outstanding researchers early in their academic careers," said Ralph E. Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in a foundation release. "Through the years, these fellowships have helped the research careers of their recipients, and we are very proud to be associated with their achievements."
The Sloan Research Fellowship is the oldest program of the Sloan Foundation and one of the oldest fellowship programs in the country. It began as a means of encouraging research by young scholars at a critical time in their careers when other support may be difficult to obtain. Grants of $45,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow's institution. Once chosen, fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry most interest them, and they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.
The Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University develops innovative research and educational programs in biological sciences, chemistry, physics, mathematics and several interdisciplinary areas. For more information, visit www.cmu.edu/mcs.
February 28, 2006
Lauren Ward
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