Award

Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, won a $3 million 2016 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences for his contributions to the development of optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control the behavior of cells and has proved especially invaluable in the study of nerve-cell circuits in the brain.

Christina Smolke, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering, has won a Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health. The award includes a five-year, $2.5 million grant to be used in highly innovative approaches that have the potential to affect a broad area of biomedical or behavioral research.

Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, has won a Transformative Research Award of $22.48 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health through a program designed to encourage high-risk, high-reward approaches to science.

Stephen Quake, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of applied physics at Stanford University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has received the 2013 Nakasone Award from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) for “prolific inventions that have advanced biological measurement techniques.”

Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist and assistant professor of bioengineering, has been honored by the White House as part of its Champions of Change Open Science program, which recognizes those who promote and use “open scientific data and publications to accelerate progress and improve our world.”