Administrative Supplement to Promote Re-Entry in Health-Related Research Careers

About This Grant

Project Summary The objective of this administrative supplement application is to promote the re-entry of a postdoctoral fellow into the biomedical workforce after a qualifying hiatus from research activities. The fellow will be engaged in research activities directly supporting one of the specific aims in the parent award, which focuses on the development of new bioorthogonal methods for unveiling chemical reactivity. Specifically, the fellow will focus on developing small, discreet tags that can be incorporated onto bioactive small molecules, inducing a minimal perturbation to the molecule’s physicochemical and target-binding properties. The small tags will then be activated through bioorthogonal chemical reaction to generate a reactive functional group, which can then label proteins in a ligand- dependent manner. The hypothesis is that these systems will feature minimalist probes that have a much smaller footprint than the current enamine N-oxide-based bioorthogonally activated reactive species (BARS) probes while offering comparable specificity in drug target identification. Another major objective of this supplement is the career development of the postdoctoral fellow. The fellow will participate in career development activities at the laboratory, department, and institute levels to ensure that they are able to get back up to speed on the current state of the chemical biology field after experiencing a long hiatus from research activities. The plan is for the fellow to gain skills in protein conjugation and modification so they can ultimately combine those skills with their existing expertise in biomaterials to launch a successful career in chemical biology and biomedical engineering.