Shawn Burdette, assistant professor of chemistry, has won a $600,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for a five-year research project in biological chemistry.
The award came from the Chemistry of Life Processes program at NSF.
It is the fourth CAREER award in the Department of Chemistry and the fifth in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the past 18 months.
The award, which recognizes promising scientists early in their careers, will fund research on “free” metals – metals such as potassium, zinc, or calcium that are unattached to biological molecules such as proteins.
As a synthetic chemist, Burdette makes molecules that bind metals and studies the effect when the metal is released.
He and his research group build chemical “cages” that allow them to introduce a metal into a biological sample and control its release. The metal can be unbound, or released from the cage, when exposed to a laser-like light source. The researchers can then study the biological response.
Burdette will collaborate with chemistry colleagues in CLAS to tune the properties of the cages for biological applications, and he will team up with experts outside the University to study metals in cells.
The technique he is developing can be applied to understanding the fundamental biochemistry of metals, knowledge that could ultimately lead to new therapeutic strategies for fighting diseases.
CAREER awards include an educational component, and Burdette will work on the SECRET (School of Exploratory Chemistry Research Experience and Training) summer outreach program that has been underway in the Department of Chemistry for the past three years.
In the SECRET program, high school students are introduced to state-of-the-art research in the laboratories of junior faculty members.
Burdette, a bioinorganic chemist, came to UConn in 2005 after a three-year National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his bachelor’s degree at Case Western Reserve University. He is a native of West Virginia.
His research group includes four graduate students, three undergraduates, and one postdoc, several of whom will be involved in the CAREER research project.
Other recent CAREER award-winners in CLAS include: José Gascón and Nicholas Leadbeater, assistant professors of chemistry; Rajeswari Kasi, assistant professor of chemistry; and Victoria Robinson, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology.
