With $1.5-million grants sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, two Penn professors will make their research interests — ranging from obesity to nanowire technology — into realities.
School of Medicine professor Patrick Seale and School of Engineering and Applied Science professor Ritesh Agarwal each received the New Innovator Award, an annual grant given to researchers from across the country. The award’s mission, according to the NIH, is to stimulate “highly innovative research” and support “promising new investigators” by funding projects over a five-year period.
“[It] allows you to take on higher-risk projects” by funding “unconventional approaches” to research topics, said Seale, one of this year’s 52 recipients.
His “high-risk, high-reward” project targets fat cell development, focusing specifically on brown fat cells, which help counteract obesity. “Rather than storing energy from food, they expend energy,” he explained.
Although the project will address the “basic research” behind these cells, it can provide the foundation for “potential therapeutic strategies” for obesity — potentially including the activation of brown fat tissue, Seale said.
Both Seale and Agarwal drew their project proposals from their postdoctoral research.
Agarwal’s project will use nanowires — wires which are measured in nanometers — to measure cell activity and provide high-resolution cellular imaging, building off of his postdoctoral studies that involved “trying to understand the electrical properties of these wires,” he said.
Nanowires carry electrical signals “between any two places,” Agarwal said — in this case, within live cells.
“Most diseases … originate at the cellular level,” he said. The project’s goal is to offer insight into intracellular processes and ultimately “help us solve, on a broad scale, a lot of health issues.”
