Six teams of scientists with wide-ranging expertise will come together to solve challenging problems with the support of new Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Collaborative Innovation Awards. HHMI will invest $40 million over the next four years to enable the teams to carry out potentially transformative research.
“The most efficient way to tackle many of today’s biggest scientific problems is to bring together experts in a variety of fields. These teams have assembled the best people in the world to address challenging problems in creative ways,” said Jack E. Dixon, HHMI’s Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. “This award offers every member of the team the support they need to move that work forward.”
The six teams were selected out of 71 applications and will address a set of problems that includes determining the structure of challenging biological systems, mapping neural circuits in the brain, and investigating the role of spatial organization in certain biological functions. Each collaborator will receive funds from HHMI to cover their research budget for the project, and the flexibility to pursue their best ideas.
The six projects and the institutions represented by each collaboration are:
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Structures of challenging biological systems with the world’s first hard X-ray laser
Stanford University, Berkley, UCLA, California Institute of Technology
Mapping global patterns of connectivity in the mammalian brain
Stanford University, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Hebrew University
Live-cell proteomics of polarized cellular structures
Harvard Medical School, Broad Institute, Harvard University, MIT
Epigenetics of behavior, longevity, and social organization in ants
New York University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Arizona State University, University of California, Riverside, Vanderbilt University
Polymerization and partitioning: mechanisms for regulating protein activity
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Marine Biological Laboratory
UCSF, UCSD
A combined chemical and genetic approach to explore how chaperone and stress networks maintain the integrity of oncogene-addicted cancer cells
UCSF, University of Pittsburgh, Max Plank Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
Read more about each team and their research goals at HHMI: Six Teams Take On New Challenges with HHMI Collaborative Innovation Awards