Fellowships to help fund faculty's research
on brain, enzymes

Yale faculty members Anna Wang Roe and Ronald Breaker are among 24 university-based science and engineering researchers nationwide who have been awarded five-year fellowships worth $125,000 yearly by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The Packard Fellowships are unrestricted grants that allow researchers "to pursue lines of inquiry that might be too risky for standard funding mechanisms," says Lynn Orr, who chaired the advisory panel that selected the recipients. "This new group of Packard Fellows represents an investment in talented young faculty. Their research will benefit society in the decades to come, and the students who work with them will make contributions that will multiply the value of the research effort many times over."

Researchers are nominated by their universities to receive Packard Fellowships. This year, both of Yale's nominees were selected for the award.

Anna Wang Roe. An assistant professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine, Roe is studying how different circuits in the brains of primates lead to visual perception of color, form, motion and depth. Her laboratory has developed a high-spatial resolution brain imaging method (i.e., optical imaging), which permits Roe and her colleagues to study the brain activation patterns in awake, trained animals as they perform perceptual and cognitive tasks. In doing so, the researchers seek to link cerebral cortex modules directly with visual perception and working memory.

Ronald Breaker. An assistant professor in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, Breaker and his research team are pioneering new techniques to improve existing enzymes and to create new enzymes that do not exist in nature. Using "test-tube evolution" -- a process patterned after natural Darwinian evolution, only at the molecular level in the absence of living cells -- more than 100 trillion different molecules can be "evolved" simultaneously to create individual examples that perform a specific biochemical function.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private, family foundation based in Los Altos, California. Since 1988, the foundation has awarded fellowships worth $125 million to 224 faculty members at 44 universities in the United States.