Dr. Matthew King and Dr. Sven Lange, both assistant professors of biochemistry and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, have been awarded Simons Empire Faculty Fellowships from the Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International.
The inaugural award, which provides Dr. King and Dr. Lange $412,500 each over three years, supports promising early-career scientists as they establish independent research programs and advance innovative work in the biomedical and basic sciences.
Dr. Matthew King
Dr. King’s award will support his research investigating intrinsically disordered proteins, which are proteins that lack a fixed or ordered three-dimensional structure, and that make up 30% of the proteome. “The attitude of the biosciences has often been that these proteins are rare mistakes that don’t matter, but they are abundant in neurons and can start to get tangled up in neurodegenerative diseases,” Dr. King said. “Thousands and thousands of proteins harbor disordered proteins. We need basic physical frameworks to understand even just how to look at them.”
Dr. King’s lab will seek answers to central questions, such as: What do intrinsically disordered regions of proteins do inside of cells? He and his team aim to develop an understanding of the proteins’ basic framework, including their essential cellular functions and potential relationship to neurodegenerative diseases and neuron health on the subcellular and atomistic level.
“Winning this award is a tremendous honor and validating,” Dr. King said. “Especially considering that co-founder Dr. Jim Simons was a brilliant mathematician who recognized that quantitative rigor is at the basis of fundamental knowledge which can translate to betterment of the human condition.”
Dr. Sven Lange
Dr. Lange’s award will support his research targeting the ubiquitin system, one of biology’s most sophisticated regulatory networks that controls nearly every cellular process. Ubiquitin is a small protein that is attached to other proteins to mark whether they should be degraded, recycled or transported to another location.
While conducting his postdoctoral research, Dr. Lange discovered how ubiquitin-tagged proteins are loaded onto motor proteins for transport in cilia, a specific antenna-shaped cellular signaling compartment. His newly established research lab will expand on this work to explore the general principles and regulatory mechanisms of ubiquitin-mediated transports in cells, a critical process to maintain protein homeostasis, which is often dysregulated in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases or disrupted by viruses.
“A strength of my laboratory is its multidisciplinary approach combining structural biochemistry, chemical biology and cell biology, which equips us to investigate intracellular transport processes across the scales of biology,” Dr. Lange said.
“This award is essential at this early career stage to establish my independent research program,” he said. “I am very grateful to the Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International for recognizing the importance of fundamental research to advance knowledge and enable future breakthroughs.”
