The Department of Energy (DOE) announced its 2015 Early Career Research Award winners in May, and among its recipients were Jeetain Mittal, assistant professor in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Lehigh University.
Entering its sixth year, the Early Career Research Program issues five-year awards providing $750K to support the development of individual research programs of outstanding scientists in the early phase of their careers.
Mittal's proposal, "Biomolecular Assembly Processes in the Design of Novel Functional Materials," was one of over 600 proposals submitted to the DOE. He was one of only 44 proposals awarding funding by the DOE.
The proposal, chosen by the office of Basic Energy Sciences, seeks to develop a comprehensive computational strategy to seamlessly connect various scales involved in DNA-mediated particle assembly, ranging from interactions between both standard Watson Crick and often ignored non-Watson Crick base pairs to interactions between two complementary DNA-coated particles and then to multi-particle assembly into complex crystalline phases.
