Pitt professor gets $1 million grant

Many students feel the closest they can come to exciting scientific discovery is through the… Many students feel the closest they can come to exciting scientific discovery is through the pages of a textbook while reading about someone else’s distant achievements.

With the help of a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Graham Hatfull, Eberly Family professor in the Pitt’s biological sciences department, hopes to change that.

Hatfull is one of 20 researchers to be named an HHMI professor. HHMI, a philanthropy society that supports biomedical research and science education, will give each of the researchers an award of $250,000 a year for four years.

As an HHMI professor, Pitt’s own Hatfull is part of a team with members from Columbia University, Stanford, Yale and Harvard.

With the help of the grant, Hatfull plans to involve science students and faculty from all levels, including high schools, in his mycobacteriophage research. A bacteriophage is a virus that attacks bacteria, and a mycobacteriophage attacks a certain kind of bacteria, namely, mycobacteria.

These microorganisms are significant to current biomedical research, since understanding how these bacteriophages damage their hosts can help scientists develop new diagnostic and treatment techniques for diseases caused by bacteria, such as tuberculosis.

Moreover, these bacteriophages may reveal new aspects of our environment, since they are the most numerous organisms in the biosphere.

“If one equates numerical supremacy with evolutionary success, they are the results of nature’s most successful experiment,” Hatfull said.

Hatfull’s program involves students isolating new mycobacteriophages, characterizing them according to their genes, and exploring the evolutionary processes that might have influenced the mycobacteriophage’s development.

The student teams collect bacteriophage samples from the environment and use DNA analysis machinery and computational techniques to study their genetic makeup. Students often find they’ve discovered new organisms, which they later give colorful names such as Corndog and Omega.

It also gives them the chance to break apart the genome, examine the specific genes and what functions they perform in the bacteriophage, and then sequence the genes, which helps them to understand how the individual genes come together to create a whole organism. Despite the complex nature of genetic research, students previously unfamiliar with the process can learn as they go by working with college students and faculty.

“The students don’t need to have a massive body of knowledge and experience in order to do this kind of work,” Hatfull said. “They learn through the process of doing it.”

The program’s other major function is to create a more coherent research community between research faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and high school students from the community.

“The lab is not a hierarchical workplace,” Hatfull said.

In his program, he plans to have graduate students and postdoctorate fellows join undergraduates in their research and act as mentors, giving the undergrads the skills they need to guide the high school students.

High school students have already joined his students in the mycobacteriophage research, and since then, many other high school students and teachers have requested to participate in the program.

Through this portion of his program, Hatfull wants to dispel the image of the inaccessible research professor, since “that has to be broken down if you want to make science accessible to a broader section of society.”

According to Hatfull, the funds from the HHMI grant will be directed towardsmvm providing stipends and salaries for the grad students, fellowships for the undergraduates, and financial assistance for high school students who want to become involved.

The money will also pay for equipment, particularly for the genomic studies, computational techniques to aid in data analysis and workshops to describe the program’s activities.

Hatfull sees the program as an opportunity for college students to contribute to the vast body of knowledge they have acquired from researchers before them, providing new information for the next generation of scientists.

“It’s like taking out a loan that you have to repay,” he said.