Professor gets $2.5 million grant

Molecular biology professor Ileana Cristea has been named one of the three inaugural recipients of the $2.5 million Avant-Garde Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

The award grants each recipient $500,000 annually over the course of five years and is aimed at encouraging research into high-impact HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in drug abusers.

Cristea’s research focuses on virus-host interactions for Sindbis fever using a methodology she developed that “allows tracking of protein localization and elucidation of interacting partners” and can be applied to HIV as well, a NIDA statement said.

Cristea, who joined the University in February 2008, will use  the award to study the manner in which HIV takes control of key proteins in gene expression.

Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School and Julio Montaner of the University of British Columbia received the other two awards. A total of 52 researchers applied for the award.