Agilent Thought Leader Program

Dr. Hashim Al-Hashimi is an influential researcher in the realm of structural biology. Dr. Al-Hashimi and his team at the University of Michigan are developing advanced methods to characterize Hoogsteen base pairs—a rare form of DNA that is structurally distinct from the typical double helix—using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Hoogsteen base pairs, named after biochemist Karst Hoogsteen, are of particular interest because of their unusual structure and biological functions. Dr. Al-Hashimi and his team believe their research could lead to significant advances in DNA-targeted drug discovery and other applications. (press release)

Dr. Ronald A. DePinho, a world-renowned oncologist and researcher, has received an Agilent Thought Leader Award in support of his research into metabolic reprogramming in the earliest stages of cancer. He is internationally recognized for basic and translational research in cancer, aging and age-associated degenerative disorders. He is only the fourth full-time president in the 70-year history of MD Anderson. (press release)

Dr. Robert E. Gerszten received an Agilent Thought Leader award in support of his research on the discovery of metabolite biomarkers for cardiovascular and related metabolic diseases. Dr Gerszten has pioneered the use of proteomics and metabolomics approaches to identify biomarkers of these diseases using the Framingham heart study cohort. (press release)

Prof. Frisvad's research is primarily in the area of fungi. His work focuses on the biochemical diversity in molds with a view to finding new enzymes and secondary metabolites which can be used in new drugs. In addition, he works on projects involving the study of mycotoxins and molds from Penicillium and Aspergillus, in an effort to prevent toxin-formation in food, indoor climates, and biotechnological products. (press release)

Russell S. Thomas, Ph.D., of the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences has been selected for an Agilent Thought Leader Award to support his work developing methods to predict drug-induced liver injury. The award includes funding from the Agilent Technologies Foundation as well as instrumentation from the company, including a 6460 triple quadrupole LC/MS and an Agilent microarray scanner. Dr. Thomas is director of the Institute for Chemical Safety Sciences at the Hamner, where researchers are applying a systems biology approach in an effort to predict drug-induced liver injury. (press release)

Dr. Chris Evelo and the department of bioinformatics at Maastricht University are the recipients of an Agilent Thought Leader Award supporting development of software to integrate different types of biological data. The goal of this award is to help accelerate breakthroughs in disease research by facilitating integrative systems biology approaches. The Evelo Lab helped develop WikiPathways.org as a community-curated platform for structuring multi-omics data and the associated open-access pathway analysis tool PathVisio. (press release)

Dr. Steven Carr of the Broad Institute (affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University) has been selected for an Agilent Thought Leader Award. The award will support Carrs efforts to develop new technologies for analyzing proteins and peptides, intended to help doctors diagnose illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and ovarian cancer. (press release)

Dr. Gerhard Wagner of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School received an Agilent Thought Leader award in support of his effort to develop methods for studying biologically relevant systems that pose a serious challenge for modern structural biology tools. Prof. Wagner's work will greatly enhance the impact of NMR spectroscopy for large protein assignment and structure determination by matching the capabilities of modern high-field instruments with suitable acquisition and processing methods. (press release)

Adam Arkin, director of SBI and of the Physical Biosciences Division at LBNL, is the Dean A. Richard Newton Memorial Professor in UC Berkeleys Department of Bioengineering. He is also co-director of the Virtual Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival, director of bioinformatics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, and co-director of BIOFAB (International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology). His research centers on uncovering the evolutionary design principles of cellular networks and populations and exploiting them for applications. He and colleagues are developing a framework to facilitate applications in health, the environment, and bioenergy by combining comparative functional genomics, quantitative measurement of cellular dynamics, biophysical modeling of cellular networks, and cellular circuit design. (press release)

Dr. Weimer's laboratory group at the School of Veterinary Medicine focuses on microbial physiology and function. Research on host/microbe interactions has led to the elucidation of the competitive binding of beneficial bacteria to the gut epithelium and the resulting displacement of pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella. Using genomics and functional genomics gene expression, metabolomics, proteomics, and metagenomics Dr. Weimer's program examines the mechanisms of gene interplay to produce a specific phenotype and the metabolism involved in the process.

Dr. David Botstein, professor and director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Center for Quantitative Biology at Princeton University, received an Agilent Thought Leader award in support of his research in the area of genomics. This award of cash funding and Agilent products to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics will allow Dr. Botstein to produce the most complete genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data sets from any eukaryote (organism with cells containing membrane-enclosed structures including nucleus) to date. (press release)

Dr. Hailu Kinde, professor at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System, received an Agilent Thought Leader award in support of his research in the area of food safety. This award of cash funding and Agilent products to the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine will allow Dr. Kinde to focus on the development of a new process that can reduce the time required to identify food-borne pathogens from several days to only a few hours. (press release)

Dr. Thomas Hartung received an Agilent Thought Leader award in support of his research on for the use of toxicity pathways to predict developmental neurotoxicity. Through this award of funding from the Agilent Foundation and a company donation of instruments to the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Hartung will focus his research on the identification of novel toxicity pathways by combining two promising cell culture models with emerging metabolomics. This work could help identify possible contributions of chemicals to disorders such as autism and attention hyperactivity disorders. (press release)

Dr. James Collins is developing innovative ways to reprogram organisms, particularly bacteria, to perform desired tasks, such as attacking tumors and guiding development of stem cells. These programmed bacteria could lead to cheaper drugs, greener fuels, and more effective treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections and diseases. He is a pioneer in systems biology, stochastic resonance, biological dynamics, and neurostimulation, with the goal of improving the function of physiological and biological systems. (press release)

Dr. George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of NIH-CEGS and DOE-GTL Genomics Centers. He has pioneered technology innovations early in the development of key fields in chemistry and biomedicine with 10 US Patents granted and several pending. As part of technology transfer to the commercial sector he has served on 22 scientific advisory boards. In 1976, his crystallographic software lead to the first high-resolution folded-RNA structure (a decade before similar structures important for ribozymes, aptamers, and RNAi). (press release)

Dr. Ingber is Founding Director of the Wyss Institute and a leader in the emerging field of biologically inspired engineering. He oversees a multifaceted effort to identify the mechanisms that living organisms use to self assemble and to apply these design principles to develop advanced materials and devices. Dr. Ingber was the first researcher to recognize that tensegrity architecture (in which a system stabilizes itself mechanically by balancing local compression with continuous tension) is a fundamental principle in the way living organisms are structured at the nanometer scale. (press release)

Dr. Janne Lehtio has worked on clinical proteomics both in academia and biotech industry. In 2004, Dr. Lehtio was selected to build mass spectrometry based proteomics at Karolinska University Hospital and continues his proteomics research there. Today, Dr. Lehtio leads a mass-spectrometry-based proteomics group at Karolinska Institutet focusing on quantitative proteomics methods development and cancer proteomics. In recent year his lab has developed several methods for clinical proteomics and currently uses these methods to understand proteome changes related to cancer therapy.

Dr. Pauline Rudd received an Agilent Thought Leader award in March 2010 in support of emerging glycomics research through a grant of funding and instruments to the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) at the University College Dublin in Ireland. The goal of the research is to develop novel approaches to analyze protein glycosylation as part of the characterization process of recombinant protein drugs and to study disease glycan biomarkers using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. (press release)