Xie receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant professor of chemistry Jin Xie has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program:

CAREER awards are among the NSF's most prestigious. The five-year grant supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Xie's research is focused on advances in nanobiotechnology, particularly the clustering of nanoparticles in biologically relevant structures that will lead to a new class of composite materials. These new materials will offer combinations that represent expanded possibilities in modern diagnosis and drug delivery within the human body.

"In the CAREER project, I aim to develop a bio-inspired assembly technology called nano-dendrimer to allow specific numbers of nanoparticles to cluster into higher nanostructures, which is challenging for conventional assembly methods," Xie said. "Our method involves ferritin, which is a protein nanocage that can be engineered through either chemical or genetic methods. We hope the approach will also find wide applications in drug delivery, imaging, tissue engineering and catalysis."

Tremendously talented faculty are the complement to the exceptional students UGA attracts - challenging as they teach, inspiring in their research. Dr. Xie exemplifies the UGA mission in a stellar chemistry department engaged at many points along the frontlines of leading-edge research. Our congratulations on this prestigious honor and the significant support for his laboratory investigations.

Image: Photo of Jin Xie by Dorothy Kozlowski courtesy of UGA.