A 2007 “Genius” Grant to Michael Elowitz
This year’s “Genius Grants” (MacArthur Foundation Fellowships) have been awarded, and one of the fellows is Michael Elowitz, a biologist at Caltech. He’s done some really amazing work on a subject near and dear to my own heart, which is on how genes interact, one branch of the so-called “Systems Biology.”
Some of his most famous works include the “repressilator”, work on competence in bacteria (PDF), and the theory (PDF) and measurement (PDF) of intrinsic vs. extrinsic noise in gene expression. All these major contributions, and he’s only 37!
Although systems biology is “hot”, not that many “systems biologists” work at the level of really fundamental, mechanistic biological questions (more common is a branch-off of bioinformatics and microarray analysis), so it’s great to see this kind of wonderful recognition for a really prominent figure in that arena.
