Caltech Expert Earns Prestigious NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award

Michael Roukes, Caltech’s Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering, has been awarded the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award.

This award, granted to only six scientists nationwide this year, “supports individuals or teams proposing transformative projects that are inherently risky and untested but have the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms,” according to the NIH.

The Transformative Research Award, established in 2009, is one of four awards in the NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Roukes’s five-year award will enable him to continue to develop novel nanotechnologies that can provide high-throughput, single-molecule analysis of the proteome—the population of all proteins within an organism.

We sat down with Roukes recently to discuss his research program, an especially intriguing one given that Roukes is a physicist.