Honors for Emr, Sundquist, Ohm and Szoo

Emr and Sundquist awarded Horwitz Prize

Scott Emr and Wesley Sundquist have won the 2024 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University for discovering the endosomal sorting complexes required for transport, or ESCRT, pathway. This prize was established by Columbia graduate S. Gross Horwitz to honor his mother. ESCRTs are sets of proteins that enable vesicles to bud out from the cytoplasm. They are required for formation of vesicles within endosomes, some types of viral envelope budding and release as well as the final steps of cell division.

Scott Emr

Wesley Sundquist

Emr is a professor emeritus of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University. The Emr lab studies the regulation of cell signaling pathways by phosphoinositide kinases, vesicle-mediated transport reactions and selective ubiquitin modifications. He won the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine in 2021, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Avanti Award in Lipids in 2007 and the ASBMB Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Emr has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Sundquist is the chair and a distinguished professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. The Sundquist lab studies the cellular, molecular and structural biology of retroviruses, particularly HIV, and the roles of the ESCRT pathway in cell division. In 2017, he received the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence. Sundquist has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences.

The awardees will be honored at a dinner and present a lecture at Columbia University in February 2025.

Ohm and Szoo win Tau Beta Pi scholarships

The Fellowship Board of Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society, has awarded scholarships to Adam Ohm and Madeline Szoo. Awardees are selected based on their academic work, campus leadership and service as well as promise of future contributions to the engineering profession.

Adam Ohm

Madeline Szoo

Ohm is an undergraduate in chemical engineering at Tennessee Technological University. He received the Badiru Scholarship, which is named for Adedeji B. Badiru, professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management at the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology and recipient of the TBP Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2024, Ohm completed an internship in quality engineering at BASF, a chemical company in Tennessee. He also interned at KLN Family Brands and ComDel Innovation.

Szoo is an undergraduate in chemical engineering at Northeastern University. She received a Stabile Scholarship, which honors Vincent A. Stabile, an engineer and philanthropist whose gifts to the TBP have endowed scholarships. Szoo performs research in the laboratory of Cynthia Hajal, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern. Szoo studies the effects of anticancer drugs on the extracellular matrix of gliomas. She also completed co-ops at Beam Therapeutics and in the lab of Tayyaba Hasan, a professor of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The awardees will each receive a scholarship worth at least $1,000.