Gus Rosania, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bush Nov. 1 at a White House ceremony.
The Presidential Award is the highest honor the U.S. government bestows on early-career scientists and engineers. This year’s 58 winners were selected by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Rosania, 38, was recognized for pioneering new experimental and computerized tools for developing drugs targeted to specific sites within cells. The award provides five years of funding to further that effort.
“Computer simulations of drug distribution in biological systems remain largely unexplored as a tool for screening drug candidates,” Rosania says.
“We envision a day when drugs will be designed, optimized and ultimately approved for clinical use in terms of their site of action, as much as drugs today are designed, optimized and approved based on their molecular mechanism of action.”
Presidential Award selections are based on recommendations from 11 federal agencies. Rosania was one of 12 researchers nominated for this year’s award by the National Institutes of Health.
“NIH is extraordinarily proud of supporting 12 PECASE winners who have, early in their research careers, shown exceptional potential for scientific leadership during the 21st century — the essence of this award,” NIH Director Elias Zerhouni says.
“We look forward to continued innovation from these outstanding investigators as they push the frontiers of medical research during this pivotal time for scientific discovery,” Zerhouni says.
Rosania came to U-M in 2001 after working as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research associate at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1989 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1996.
At the University, Rosania heads a research group that studies the microscopic transport properties of small drug-like molecules inside cells.
Rosania’s Subcellular Drug Transport Laboratory uses high-throughput microscopic imaging instruments to capture the local distribution and dynamics of small molecules inside cells. For image data analysis, Rosania’s team is developing innovative computational tools and statistical strategies, combining cheminformatics and machine vision to relate the chemical structure of small molecules of varying chemical structures to their subcellular distribution.
“Our ultimate aim is to help educate the next generation of pharmaceutical scientists and medicinal chemists throughout the world, as much as to facilitate the practical development of drugs against diseases neglected by the pharmaceutical industry, such as parasitic infections,” Rosania writes on his lab’s Web site.
The Presidential Awards were established in 1996 to honor and support the extraordinary achievements of young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers in the fields of science and technology.
