Boal wins SBIC award; Watterson named fellow of inventors academy

Inventors academy makes Watterson a fellow

Daniel Martin Watterson, a professor at Northwestern University, has 39 patents to his name. Thus, it’s no surprise he was tapped as a 2022 fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. 

Daniel Watterson is a professor of pharmacology at Northwestern University.

Watterson earned his Ph.D. from Emory University, was a postdoctoral fellow in bioorganic chemistry at Duke University and has held faculty positions at Rockefeller University and Vanderbilt University. He is best known for clarifying signal transduction pathways in eukaryotic cells that play roles in health resilience and disease susceptibility. Understanding these pathways could point the way to new therapeutic approaches in tumor biology, intestinal disorders and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and neuropsychiatric disorders. 

Watterson is also a co-discoverer of the calcium-binding messenger protein calmodulin. His research now focuses on optimizing three small molecules that are in clinical trials for neurological disorders and preclinical development of a novel candidate for use to treat depression. The molecules could also see potential use for tissue barrier dysfunctions in gastrointestinal and pulmonary disorders. 

The NIA 2022 fellows were announced late last year and will be officially inducted June 27 at the 12th annual meeting of the academy in Washington, D.C.  Watterson’s prior honors include the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation’s Melvin R. Goodes Prize and the Elan Award for Novel Approaches to Drug Discovery for Alzheimer’s Disease. In addition to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, he is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the American Chemical Society.