University Relations

Finalists Announced for the 2012 Agilent Early Career Professor Award:
Congratulations to each of the finalists for the 2012 Agilent Early Career Professor Award for rising to the top of a very competitive nomination process.

• Lynette Cegelski, Stanford University
• Elad Harel, Northwestern University
• Rachel Martin, UC Irvine
• Anthony Mittermaier, McGill University
• Jun Yin, University of Chicago

Purpose:

The purpose of the Agilent Early Career Professor Award is to:

• Promote and encourage excellent research enabling measurements of importance to Agilent Technologies and the world
  
• Establish strong collaborative relationships between Agilent researchers and leading professors early in their career
• Build the prominence of Agilent as a sponsor of university research

Selection Criteria:

• Significant original research contributions enabling measurements of importance to Agilent Technologies and the world
• Outstanding potential for future research
• 2012 focus: Contributions to the subset of structural biology aimed at utilizing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) techniques to improve the understanding of molecular structure and function of nucleic acids or proteins.
  
• Professor completed Ph.D. less than 10 years before January 1, 2012
  

Award Information:

• An unrestricted research award of $50,000 per year for 2 years to university in the professor's name
• Option to use all or part of award to obtain Agilent products at 50% discount
• Option to accelerate payments to facilitate procurement of equipment with list price over $100k
• Engraved plaque commemorating award
• Recognition on Agilent's website
  

Application Process for 2012:

• The nomination form requires contact information, a summary of the nominee's qualifications and future directions (up to 1000 words), a nomination letter (up to 500 words) and a CV. Self-nominations are encouraged. Please do not include any proprietary information.
  
• Completed nomination form is sent to Agilent University Relations:
  Email: university_relations@agilent.com
  Nomination deadline - January 31, 2012
  
• Finalists (no more than five) are chosen from the pool of nominees by the Agilent Early Career Professor Award Committee using the criteria above. The Award Committee is appointed by Director of University Relations and External Research. Finalists are announced by February 8, 2012.
• Finalists are to submit two letters of recommendation addressing why the candidate is an excellent match to the award selection criteria along with a photo. Deadline - March 23, 2012.
• The award winner will be announced by May 11, 2012.
• Award is bestowed upon professor in suitable ceremony. The winner's photo will be posted on the website.
• Winner is invited to make a presentation at an Agilent site (at Agilent’s expense).
• Past and present winners’ names are posted on the Agilent website along with articles highlighting the principal academic contributions for which the awardees were selected.
  

2011 Agilent Early Career Professor Award Winner
2011 focus: Alignment with the field of integrated biology, including the individual omics. Work in this area will typically involve two or more of the omics (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) and will seek to build understanding by relating the different views of biological systems while contributing to the understanding of life.

Dr. Michael Jewett Northwestern University Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering Jewett Lab

Dr. Jewett joined the faculty of Engineering at Northwestern in 2009 where he engineers biological systems for compelling applications in medicine and biotechnology. He made strong contributions to cell-free biology during his Ph.D. work at Stanford, to systems biology at the Technical University of Denmark, and to synthetic biology at Harvard as a post-doctoral researcher before coming to Northwestern.

In James Swartz's lab at Stanford University, Jewett developed a high yielding and cost-effective bacterial cell-free protein synthesis platform that is now being used as a high-throughput protein production platform and for the commercial production of personalized medicines. Although cell-free translation systems had been used for more than 50 years, Jewett demonstrated that central metabolism, oxidative phosphorylation, transcription, and translation could be co-activated in a single test tube under conditions conducive to high-level protein synthesis.

In Jens Nielsen’s lab at the Technical University of Denmark, Jewett generated the first datasets in yeast that integrated data across at least three levels of the cellular hierarchy and protein interaction information with metabolic network topology. Jewett and colleagues discovered that genome-scale metabolic models could be used to upgrade the information content obtained in systems-level data for bridging the gap between transcriptional state and metabolic flux.

In George Church’s lab at the Harvard Medical School, Jewett constructed ribosomes in vitro as a milestone towards a novel ribosome evolution platform and the construction of synthetic life. In a demonstration elusive for four decades, he showed that Escherichia coli ribosomes could be reconstituted in a one-step incubation procedure under chemical conditions that mimic the cytoplasm. Jewett also discovered that ribosomal RNA synthesis could be combined with ribosome self-assembly to make functionally active ribosomes. This advance promises to accelerate the development of synthetic ribosomes capable of producing and evolving non-natural peptide drugs and hybrid materials.

Jewett received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1999 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his M.S. in 2001 and his Ph.D. in 2005 Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.

Past Winners