Hal Alper, chemical engineering assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin, has won a national 2008 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award. This $50,000 award supports faculty at the beginning of their first tenure-track appointment who demonstrate the potential to produce an independent body of scientific scholarship of outstanding quality and will make significant contributions to education in the chemical sciences.
Alper engineers cells to produce important chemicals such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals and other industrial commodity chemicals. The supported work will focus on engineering molecular transporter proteins to improve metabolic pathways and pathway flux. The methods developed in his laboratory are generic and focus on using biological conversion rather than petroleum-based chemical processing. In doing so, Alper focuses on using different cellular systems to produce commodity and specialty chemicals, and biofuels.
Prior to coming to The University of Texas at Austin, Alper’s research findings were published in 14 technical articles including several in the highly cited journals Science, Nature Biotechnology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
