Chemistry Professor Megan Spence Wins NSF CAREER Award

07/10/09

Megan Spence, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER award based on her proposal entitled "Discrepancies in Raft Size Between Cellular and Model Membranes: Solid-State NMR Measurements of Protein Effect on Lipid Raft Size."

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research.

Professor Spence's research focuses on peripheral and integral membrane proteins with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. Although one-third of eukaryotic proteins are membrane proteins, only a handful have been structurally characterized, putting membrane-associated proteins at the frontier of structural biology. The partly-ordered nature of these membrane-associated systems requires us to develop new NMR techniques for systems at the solids/liquids interface as well as employing existing solid-state and solution-state NMR techniques.