Sean Brady named HHMI Early Career Scientist

Sean F. Brady, assistant professor and head of the Laboratory of Genetically Encoded Small Molecules at The Rockefeller University, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Early Career Scientist. The Early Career Scientist program, launched in 2008, was created to support the work of exceptional researchers who are at the early stage of their careers and thus vulnerable to funding challenges. Brady, who investigates the therapeutic potential of naturally occurring small molecules, is one of 50 scientists chosen in the institute’s inaugural competition.

Since joining the Rockefeller University faculty in 2006, Brady has pursued three areas of research. First, he is developing new strategies to identify and therapeutically harness biosynthetic gene clusters in uncultured — and thus previously inaccessible — soil microbes. Second, he is using bioinformatics to identify gene clusters in sequenced pathogenic bacteria that enable the mechanisms of infection and propagation, with the aim of developing therapeutic tools that can interrupt those mechanisms and might provide a weapon against drug-resistant bacteria. Third, Brady is inventing new techniques to visualize and detect small molecules in vivo.

HHMI’s Early Career Scientist program offers awardees a six-year appointment and full funding, including salary, benefits and a research budget. The winners, chosen from among more than 2,000 applicants from 33 institutions, have led their own laboratories for two to six years and have made considerable contributions in the areas of basic biological and biomedical research and areas of chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering that are directly related to biology or medicine.

HHMI is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to conduct basic biomedical research, which it carries out in collaboration with more than 60 universities, medical centers and other research institutions throughout the United States. Approximately 350 investigators work in HHMI-funded laboratories, including 14 HHMI investigators who are on the faculty of Rockefeller University.