This year, Tufts' Professor Kyongbum Lee of the Department of Chemical Engineering was awarded the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Best Paper Award on Oct. 4 at the Metabolic Engineering VI Conference in The Netherlands.
Lee said that winning the award was a "very nice honor" and that the prize is mainly "recognition by one's peers."
He was also awarded a small cash prize sponsored by the DuPont Co. of about $4,000.
"As a relatively new professor, it is challenging to break into any academic field and make an immediate impact. However, Lee has managed to do just that in the fields of metabolic and tissue engineering," said Andrew Wood, a graduate student and one of Lee's advisees. "This award is only the beginning for Lee. He is always coming up with new ideas and projects."
The winning paper, entitled "Identification of distributed metabolic objectives in the hypermetabolic liver by flux and energy balance analysis" was printed in the January 2006 issue of Metabolic Engineering.
The paper succeeds in investigating what the metabolic objectives of mammalian cells are and determining how to distinguish them.
"We had to first figure out how to describe the cells' behavior in a quantitative fashion using easily measurable information, like their sugar uptake and the rate of respiration," Lee said. "Our paper essentially describes a method whereby these simple measurements can be interpreted in the context of a network of chemical reactions so that we have a detailed description of cellular metabolic behavior."
Two Tufts graduate students were the first and second authors of the paper along with Lee. Ryan Nolan, now at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, as the first author was the one who drafted the manuscript, and Andrew Fenley, now at National Instruments, developed some of the computer programs that they used in their testing.
Lee was also Nolan's thesis advisor while he worked on his master's degree. "He is dedicated and passionate about his research, and is always full of novel ideas and approaches to solving problems in the field," Nolan said. "Lee is truly one of a kind, and his winning the award was definitely well-deserved."
Lee was nominated for the award by Professor Martin Yarmush of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, his advisor when he conducted his post-doctoral research.
Qualifications for the award include that the professor must be less than 36 years of age and must be published in the journal Metabolic Engineering as the senior author of the paper.
Lee acknowledged Yarmush, Professor Christina Chan at Michigan State University and Professor David Kaplan, the chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering here at Tufts, all of whom wrote letters of support in reference to his paper.
The award is named for James E. Bailey, a world-renowned researcher and pioneer in the fields of biochemical and metabolic engineering.
