Emily Derbyshire, assistant professor of chemistry at Duke University, and Huanghe Yang, assistant professor of biochemistry in the Duke University School of Medicine, have been named the recipients of a 2017 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. As part of the NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the award grants 1.5 million dollars over a five-year period to fund innovative, high-impact research from exceptionally creative early career investigators.
Derbyshire’s team is engaged in ongoing efforts to understand the early stages of Plasmodium infection in humans, a key starting point in the development of new antimalarial therapies for overcoming parasite drug resistance. Yang’s research combines biophysical, optical, genetic, and physiologic methods to understand membrane ion and lipid transport at the molecular, cellular and organismal level.