Ghiladi wins NSF CAREER Award

Reza Ghiladi, assistant professor of chemistry at NC State University, has received an Early Career Development Award, more commonly known as a CAREER Award, from the National Science Foundation. The award is one of the highest honors given by NSF to early-career university faculty in science and engineering, and is intended to advance the development of their research and careers.

PAMS faculty have been extremely successful in recent years in competing for these awards, earning 21 CAREER Awards since 2004. The Department of Chemistry has been especially productive, with six CAREER Awards in the last five years – including two this year alone.

Ghiladi’s five-year, $520,000 grant will fund research related to his proposal, titled “Structural, Spectroscopic, and Mechanistic Investigations of Native and Engineered Hemoglobin-Peroxidases.” Through this work, Ghiladi and his team will probe the mechanism and expand the substrate profile of dehaloperoxidase (DHP), the archetype of an emerging class of bifunctional proteins known as the hemoglobin-peroxidases that are capable of performing dechlorination reactions.

“Chlorinated phenols are persistent chemical pollutants that have been shown to give rise to both acute and long-term health risks in humans,” Ghiladi says. “By studying the potential of DHP to act as a bioremediation catalyst, we hope to learn if we can develop new proteins capable of the catalytic degradation of such chlorinated phenols, thereby minimizing their impact on both human health and the environment.”

A native of Maryland, Ghiladi earned his B.S. in chemistry from Haverford College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Dr. Ken Karlin. He completed postdoctoral research assignments at the Mayo Clinic and the University of California-San Francisco before joining the NC State faculty in 2006.

For more information, please visit the Ghiladi Research Group Website: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~raghilad/Ghiladi/Welcome.html.