Five scientists have received John F. and Virginia B. Taplin Awards from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), awards given annually to help build the educational and training infrastructure of the division.
This year's winners will receive the first multi-year Taplin grants, totaling $42,000 per researcher for a three-year period. The winners and their projects are listed below.
-- Bertrand Delgutte, principal research scientist in the Research Lab for Electronics, for "Laboratory Exercise in Neural Modeling for Speech and Hearing and Neuroengineering."
-- Donald E. Ingber, an affiliated faculty member of HST, to establish a new "Biocomplexity Initiative" within the division.
-- Isaac S. Kohane, research affiliate at the Lab for Computer Science, and Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos of chemistry for "Multi-institutional HST-based Training Grant for Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics."
-- Lucila Ohno-Machado, an affiliated faculty member of HST, for "Building a Curriculum for Biomedical Informatics."
"We are deeply grateful to John and Virginia Taplin for their generosity and commitment to HST," said Dr. Martha Gray, co-director of HST and holder of the Edward Hood Taplin Professorship in Health Sciences and Technology. "The Taplin Awards have become critical to HST's ability to stay current with the constant changes in our fields and maintain the highest quality education and training for physician-scientists who are dedicated to finding solutions to unmet medical needs."
John Taplin graduated from MIT in 1935 and pursued a successful career as an inventor and entrepreneur. He was responsible for the development of the Fenwal plastic blood bag, long the world standard for transporting and handling blood. The Taplins are committed to the translation of scientific discovery into applications that can generate preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic innovations.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 25, 2000.
