L'Oréal USA Announces Recipients of 2012 L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science

L'Oréal USA announced the recipients of the 2012 L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science. The L'Oréal USA program is a national initiative that annually recognizes and rewards five U.S.-based women researchers early in their careers. Recipients each receive up to $60,000 towards their postdoctoral research.

"We are proud to partner with L'Oréal USA and its Fellowships For Women In Science Program. We, too, strongly believe it is important to raise awareness of the contributions women make in science, technology, engineering and math, and these fellows represent the next great generation of female researchers," said Shirley Malcom, head of directorate of education and human resource Pprogram with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This year's awards will recognize and support the following female scientists and their work:

Christina Agapakis, University of California, Los Angeles, synthetic biologist. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will help her focus on engineering new relationships between microorganisms that usually would not find each other in nature. Her research includes attention to how bacteria can work together in natural ecosystems and how those relationships can be useful in biotechnology, which typically uses only isolated organisms one at a time.

Lilian Childress, Yale University, physicist in quantum optics. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will allow Childress to develop a new optomechanical device based on a potentially dissipationless mechanical material: superfluid helium. Combining excellent optical properties with superfluid flow and novel excitations, this system could drastically reduce optical and mechanical losses and provide a window into many-body physics.

Joanna Lynne Kelley, Stanford University, geneticist interested in biological diversity. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will provide her with an opportunity to explore the genomic basis of adaptation to environments containing high levels of hydrogen sulfide. She will use sulfide spring populations of the fish Poecilia from three river drainages to study adaptive trait divergence, differentiation in gene sequences and gene expression patterns.

Erin Marie Williams, The George Washington University, paleoanthropologist in a biomechanics laboratory. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will help Williams investigate the decision-making processes and abilities of our early human ancestors as evidenced through their selection of raw materials for the production and use of early Stone Age technologies.

Jaclyn Winter, University of California, Los Angeles, biochemist interested in chemical diversity of biologically active natural products. The L'Oréal USA Fellowships For Women In Science award will enable her to interrogate the biosynthetic strategies that nature uses for assembling small molecules in fungi and investigate how their biosynthetic systems can be engineered to generate novel metabolites or otherwise inaccessible derivatives for testing in biological assays.

For more information, please visit the Facebook page for L'Oréal USA For Women In Science.

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