Jin Xie, an assistant chemistry professor in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program.
CAREER awards are among the NSF’s most prestigious. The five-year grant supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.
Xie’s research is focused on advances in nanobiotechnology, particularly the clustering of nanoparticles in biologically relevant structures that will lead to a new class of composite materials. These new materials will offer combinations that represent expanded possibilities in modern diagnosis and drug delivery within the human body.
“In the CAREER project, I aim to develop a bio-inspired assembly technology called nano-dendrimer to allow specific numbers of nanoparticles to cluster into higher nanostructures, which is challenging for conventional assembly methods,” Xie said. “Our method involves ferritin, which is a protein nanocage that can be engineered through either chemical or genetic methods. We hope the approach will also find wide applications in drug delivery, imaging, tissue engineering and catalysis.”
Xie arrived at UGA after postdoctoral appointments at the National Institutes of Health and Stanford University. He was awarded his doctorate from Brown University in 2008.
“Jin Xie’s selection for an NSF CAREER Award places him among an elite group of young analytical chemists in the U.S.,” said Jonathan Amster, professor and head of the chemistry department. “I fully expect that Jin will garner more awards in the future, given the trajectory of his research accomplishments as an assistant professor.”
CAREER grants allow young faculty members to solidify their research programs and progress toward scholarly publishing.