SB Faculty Receives NYSTAR's Watson Investigator Award

STONY BROOK , NY - On January 28th, the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR) announced Dr. Elizabeth Marshall Boon, Assistant Professor at Stony Brook's Chemistry department, as one of the recipients of a Watson Investigator Award.

Edward Reinfurt, Executive Director of NYSTAR, announced $600,000 in awards designed to recognize and support outstanding young scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show potential for leadership and scientific discovery in the field of biotechnology. Others researchers awarded this year include: Mark Andrew Borden of Columbia University; and Abraham D. Stoock of Cornell University .

"These awards reflect the State's commitment to increasing our intellectual capital for advancing the innovation economy. The Watson awards encourage early career scientists to stay and conduct their critically important science research here in New York State," said Reinfurt.

Boon was awarded $200,000 for her research in modifying the protein Heme-Nitric Oxide (H-NOX) for use as a gas detector an in vivo gas delivery system. She is currently leading a research group in Stony Brook's Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery to explore the fundamentals and applications of the H-NOX family, and peptide and protein engineering for sensing applications. Sensing and signal transduction proteins and smaller peptide segments can be used to develop new biosensors and answer fundamental questions about uncharacterized sensing modules.

Boon received her Ph.D. (2002) in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and Associate Bachelors Degree (1997) with Highest Honors in Chemistry from Kenyon College. She was a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California , Postdoctoral Scholar, NIH and Ralph M. Parson Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, and has received several other awards and scholarships. She is also the founding scientist and advisor of Omniox, Inc., a biotechnology company founded in 2006 to develop oxygen delivery therapeutics.

The young researcher also recently won the American Chemical Society (ACS)/Dreyfus Lectureship Award, otherwise known as the "Rising Star" award. The award is a joint program between ACS and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation to provide travel support for "rising star" academic women scientists and engineers to present their work at leading research institutions.