Two Cornell faculty members receive NSF 'Early Career' awards

Joo

By Susan S. Lang

Two Cornell faculty members are among this year's recipients of National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Awards. The Faculty Early Career Development Program offers NSF's most prestigious award for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

Matthew DeLisa and Yong Joo, both assistant professors of chemical and biomolecular engineering, each will receive five-year grants of about $500,000.

DeLisa received a B.S. in chemical engineering at University of Connecticut-Storrs in 1996. He earned a master's in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2000 at the University of Maryland, both in chemical engineering. He joined the Cornell faculty in 2003 after working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin from 2001 to 2003.

His research focuses on the molecular engineering of biological systems in which protein machines play an important role. Specifically, he aims to blend protein engineering principles with the tools of genetics and molecular biology to better understand how complex protein machines perform their given tasks; he hopes to build an integrated understanding of how the function of cellular machines affects the behavior of cells and organisms. This requires the development of methods for perturbing and monitoring dynamic protein machinery in cells, for reconstituting functional machines from their constituent parts or designing and building new ones from scratch, and for quantitative modeling of protein machinery.

DeLisa

In the project funded by the NSF award, DeLisa will develop techniques to analyze and engineer a model complex protein machine, namely the bacterial twin-arginine translocation (Tat) machinery. By exploiting the twin-arginine translocation system for protein expression that transports folded proteins across the E. coli membrane, he hopes to shed light on a poorly understood biological mechanism that could lead to the expression of commercially important proteins, the identification of correctly folded protein sequences and the creation of novel biotechnology-based drugs.

Joo did his undergraduate study in chemical engineering at Seoul National University. He received a master's degree in 1990 and a Ph.D. in 1993, both from Stanford University in chemical engineering. He joined the Cornell faculty in July 2001.

His research focuses on the integration of continuum analysis with molecular details in polymeric materials processing, specifically the microstructural rheology and processing of complex fluids, the formation of nanofibers via electrospinning and the occurrence of purely elastic instabilities in polymer flows. In the project funded by the NSF award, Joo will investigate nanofiber formation directly from polymer melts, offering a novel solvent-free approach. The proposed melt electro-spinning process can overcome some of current barriers for commercializing conventional nanofiber technology. The award will also provide research experiences for middle and high school teachers and urban high school students as well as Cornell undergraduate students; short courses on research ethics and modules on fiber science also will be developed for grades K-12.