Mark Mimee, assistant professor of molecular engineering and microbiology, has received a Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. This year’s award offers $600,000 in funding over four years to promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, intended to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open new avenues of research in science.
“This outstanding group of young scientists are bringing creative approaches in material synthesis, new medical devices, and plastic recycling, among other major challenges. We are thrilled to support their work as they start their independent research careers, and can’t wait to see the exciting results in the years ahead!” said Anne Hultgren, executive director of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, in a statement.
Mimee is a biological engineer who uses synthetic biology to manipulate the microbiome, exploring strategies to modify commensal bacteria and bacteriophage for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The sheer complexity and variability of the microbiome in the human body, however, as well as a lack of robust strategies to make precise edits to microbial communities, are major challenges to studying and controlling its function.
In the new project Mimee proposed for the award, his team will take inspiration from natural 'genetic engineers' of microbial communities and leverage bioengineered bacterial viruses, called bacteriophage, to develop a microbiome editing platform. Using synthetic biology techniques, they will create a new class of viral vectors that can extrinsically control the composition and activity of the microbiome, allowing for future mechanistic studies in microbiome research and for translation into actionable therapies.
This year’s 10 awardees were selected from a pool of over 225 applicants after a three-part review led by a panel of scientific experts. Founded in 1978, the Beckman Foundation supports United States institutions and young scientists whose creative, high-risk, and interdisciplinary research will lead to innovations and new tools and methods for scientific discovery.
—This article was adapted from an original release on the Biological Sciences Division website.