Two Medical Faculty Win Shaw Scientist Awards

Two faculty in the UW–Madison Medical School will receive 1997 Shaw Scientist Awards, given annually to promising young scientists by the Milwaukee Foundation.

Winners are Johannes Hell, an assistant professor in the department of pharmacology; and Shigeki Miyamoto, an assistant professor in the department of human oncology.

The $200,000 awards offer unrestricted research support to faculty just developing their research careers. The award is given in $40,000 annual increments over five years, and can be used at the researcher’s discretion to support their studies.

Hell, who joined the pharmacology faculty in 1995, studies the molecular basis of signals transmitted between nerve cells in the brain. His work promises to shed new light on the physiological basis of Alzheimer’s Disease and potentially lead to new treatments.

Miyamoto, on the human oncology faculty since 1995, studies how cells transmit signals from their outside to their nucleus. Cell signals can follow many pathways, and Miyamoto focuses on one that has been tied to cancer’s origins.

Established by the Milwaukee Foundation in 1982, the Shaw Scientist Award is the largest Wisconsin-based resource devoted to original scientific research. Winners are chosen from the state’s two principal research universities, UW–Madison and UW-Milwaukee, by a five-member national panel of distinguished scientists.

The award is made possible by a bequest from the late Dorothy Shaw, a Milwaukee resident with a lifelong interest in science. For more information about the awards, contact Frank Miller at (414) 272-5805.