By Duke Medicine News and Communications

DURHAM, NC -- Homme Hellinga, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University Medical Center, is among nine research scientists from across the United States to win a new series of awards from the National Institutes of Health geared to promote innovation.

The NIH Pioneer Award was designed by NIH director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., to support individual scientists and thinkers with highly innovative ideas and approaches to contemporary challenges in biomedical research.

A central component of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, the Pioneer Award was established in January 2004 to encourage exceptional researchers and thinkers from multiple disciplines to conduct high-risk, high-impact research related to the improvement of human health.

To inaugurate this new program, the NIH will provide $500,000 in direct costs per year for five years to each Pioneer Award recipient, allowing them the time and resources to test far-ranging ideas with the potential to make extraordinary contributions to medical research.

The awardees are listed below:

Larry Abbott, PhD, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

George Daley, MD, PhD, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, MA

Homme Hellinga, PhD, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC

Joseph McCune, MD, PhD, J. David Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, CA

Steven McKnight, PhD, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX

Chad Mirkin, PhD, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

Rob Phillips, PhD, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

Stephen Quake, PhD, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

Sunney Xie, PhD, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

The nine recipients represent a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines including quantitative and mathematical biology, pathogenesis, epidemiology and translational clinical research, molecular and cellular biology, integrative physiology, instrumentation and bioengineering.

For more information on the NIH Director's Pioneer Award Program, including awardee information, please visit the Web site at http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/highrisk/index.asp.