PHILADELPHIA –Benjamin Aaron Garcia, PhD, a Presidential Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected to receive the 2016Protein Science Young Investigator Award.
The award, named for the academic journal of the Protein Society, recognizes a scientist within the first eight years of an independent career who has made an important contribution to the study of proteins.
Garcia and recipients in other categories will be recognized at the 30th Anniversary Symposium of the Protein Society, July 16-19, 2016, in Baltimore, Maryland. Plenary talks from each recipient are scheduled throughout the event.
Garcia’s pioneering research involves developing new mass spectrometry methods and bioinformatic computational tools to examine critical modifications in cellular proteins that alter and control their functions. This is important in understanding the molecular pathways that underpin cancer, among other areas.
Specifically, he has been developing analytical and computational tools to understand the complexity of simultaneously occurring histone modifications. Histones are a family of proteins found in cell nuclei that package and order the DNA into nucleosomes (a segment of DNA wound in sequence around eight histone protein cores). This structure is often compared to thread wrapped around a spool. They are the chief protein components of chromatin, the material of which the chromosomes of organisms other than bacteria composed.
Garcia earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Virginia and a BS in chemistry from the University of California, Davis. Before coming to Penn he was assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, where he had taught since 2008, following three years as an NIH-NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Genomic Biology of the University of Illinois. He was named the first Presidential Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Presidential Term Professorships, supported in part by a major grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, are awarded to exceptional scholars, of any rank, who contribute to faculty eminence through diversity across the University.
Garcia has received more than a dozen major awards, including a Presidential Early Career Award, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government on young scientists and engineers; a National Science Foundation Early Career Award; a National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award; and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
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