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Poornima Padmanabhan, an Indian-American professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a private research university in the New York urban area, got a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award.
RIT press release says – Padmanabhan, who is a professor in the chemical engineering department, that she won.
The award is $478,476 for five years.
The award was given to discover how chiral structures—or mirror-image, entangled molecules—function, a process essential to understanding how different cell types are formulated in biochemical development. The concepts can provide details about how synthetic materials can be further developed for use in the pharmaceutical industry, in agriculture or food analysis, and in the development of novel materials to enhance sensing and imaging applications.
“We can think about how proteins fold, how life originated, we can think about how biology forms chiral structures and the reason they work is very exciting is we don’t know how these phenomena happen,” said Padmanabhan, an assistant professor of chemical engineering in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, as per the release.
Facts about Poornima Padmanabhan –
- At RIT, she is co-director of the Computational Materials Research Nucleus Lab
- Before coming to RIT, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University
- She has also received Alice H. Cook and Constance E. Cook Award, given by the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity for commitment to women’s issues and improving the climate for women at the university.
- She advocates gender diversity and increasing the pipeline of students in STEM degree
The RIT press release remarked that “scientists look to space for origins of the solar system; chemical engineers like Poornima Padmanabhan are searching for the origins of life-based on minute systems of molecules.”
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