CONGRATULATIONS TO Professors Jessica Kramer and Jia Niu ON RECEIVING THE 2023 DAVID Y. GIN YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD!
This year The Division has decided to award TWO Gin Awards due to a very high number of highly qualified nominees.
Professor Jessica Kramer obtained her Honors B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Utah and her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from UCLA under the direction of Prof. Tim Deming. She joined the lab of Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford and the University of California Berkeley as an NIH and University of California Chancellor’s postdoctoral Fellow. Prof. Kramer began her independent career at the University of Utah in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2017. Her lab utilizes a combination of polymer chemistry and protein engineering to probe fundamental questions in mucin glycobiology relevant to cancer and infection processes. She is the recipient of the Marion Milligan Mason Award (2022), an NIH MIRA (2022), an NSF RAPID (2020), an NSF CAREER Award (2018), Dream Chemistry Award (2017), an NIH NRSA (2015), and the Henkel Award in Polymer Chemistry (2015).
Professor Jia Niu is an assistant professor of chemistry in Boston College. Jia obtained a B.S. degree (2005) and a M.S. degree (2008) from Tsinghua University in China. He then moved to the United States to pursue a PhD degree at Harvard University, working with Professor David R. Liu. After completing postdoctoral training in the laboratories of Professor Craig Hawker and Professor Tom Soh at University of California, Santa Barbara, Jia joined the faculty of Boston College in 2017. Currently, Jia and his group work on developing synthetic approaches to precision polysaccharides and glycomimetic polymers, understanding functional roles of sulfation patterns in biomacromolecules, and the directed evolution of functional nucleic acids. Jia is a recipient of Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2023), ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2020), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2019), and the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2019).
