Chakraborty-lab receives $1.82 million NIH R35 award

Tonmoy Chakraborty, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of New Mexico, has received a five-year, $1.82 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (R35) to further his research on the development of new microscope modalities.

Advances in microscopy and imaging technology have spurred important discoveries in biology, both in health and disease. However, current imaging methods have limitations in acquisition speed, spatial resolution, and the number of possible labels that can be imaged which restrict the types of biological questions that can be addressed.

With this grant Chakraborty and his team will develop new user-friendly imaging modalities that will not only improve the spatiotemporal resolution of the current state-of-the-art but will also enable researchers to probe biological questions that span several orders of magnitude in scale.

"We are extremely excited about the direction of research proposed in this grant and very grateful to the review panel for giving this proposal a near-perfect score. We sincerely hope that, through this grant, we can push the boundaries of biomedical imaging further," said Chakraborty.

The goal of an NIH MIRA award is to increase the efficiency of National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) funding by providing investigators with greater stability and flexibility, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for important breakthroughs.