Pratt
Wani
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Biogeochemist Lisa Pratt is the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Faculty Award from the IU College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association. Also honored at an Oct. 17 dinner was Mansukh Wani, who received the Distinguished Alumni Award.
Pratt is on the faculty of the IUB Department of Geological Sciences and is the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at IU, headquarters of eight research “lead teams” that will be employing a series of field and laboratory experiments to figure out the best way of detecting life beyond Earth. The Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology Institute, as it is formally known, will receive $5 million in funding from NASA over five years. The formal research project to be pursued is “Detection of Biosustainable Energy and Nutrient Cycles in the Deep Subsurface of Earth and Mars.”
Wani is a principal scientist at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. He is co-discoverer of Taxol and Camptothecin, two anti-cancer drugs considered standard in the treatment to fight ovarian, breast, lung and colon cancers. In 2000, he received one of the most prestigious awards for applied research in medicine, the Charles F. Kettering Prize, from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
http://www.indiana.edu/~geosci/research/astrobiology.html
http://www.rti.org/
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