Jason Crawford Receives 2017 Burroughs Wellcome Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award

June 16, 2017

The Chemistry Department would like to congratulate Jason Crawford on receiving a 2017 Burroughs Wellcome Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award. He received the award for his project on a functional metagenomic screen to systematically identify human-bacteria interactions.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has supported research in infectious disease since 1981, when it began funding modern molecular approaches to understanding what have been called the great neglected diseases – malaria, the pathogenic fungi, and human parasites – that primarily affect people in underdeveloped countries.  Since that time, much more attention has been paid to the urgent needs of these fields. In 2000, the Fund decided to turn its attention to the larger issues of human-pathogen interactions in these infectious diseases and others, opening the door for funding work in bacterial and viral diseases. BWF’s Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease program is designed to incorporate elements of previously funded areas of research, and to focus primarily on the interaction of pathogens with their human hosts.

The Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease program provides opportunities for assistant professors to bring multidisciplinary approaches to the study of human infectious diseases. The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for accomplished investigators still early in their careers to study what happens at the points where the systems of humans and potentially infectious agents connect. The program supports research that sheds light on the fundamentals that affect the outcomes of these encounters: how colonization, infection, commensalism, and other relationships play out at levels ranging from molecular interactions to systemic ones.

PATH is a highly competitive award program that provides $500,000 over a period of five years. The awards are intended to give recipients the freedom and flexibility to pursue new avenues of inquiry, stimulating higher risk research projects that hold potential for significantly advancing understanding of how infectious diseases work and how health is maintained.

Congratulations Jason!