Bioinformatics expert Richard Green wins Sloan Research Fellowship

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information Office

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship to Richard E. (Ed) Green, assistant professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

The prestigious two-year fellowship includes a $50,000 grant to support Green's research, which focuses on genome analysis and the study of ancient DNA. The Sloan Research Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields.

Green has helped pioneer the use of advanced sequencing technology to study ancient DNA extracted from fossil bones. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, he coordinated the Neanderthal Genome Project. A paper on the Neanderthal genome published in 2010 earned him the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the outstanding paper published in the journal Science. A subsequent paper published in December described a previously unknown group of human relatives, called "Denisovans." In addition to the Neanderthal genome and ancient DNA, Green's research interests include human evolutionary genetics and the regulation of gene expression.

Green earned a B.S. in genetics at the University of Georgia, Athens, and a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology, with an emphasis in computational and genomic biology, at UC Berkeley. He joined the faculty of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz in January 2010.

The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded in close cooperation with the scientific community. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. The fellowships are awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grantmaking institution that supports original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economic performance.