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11/18/2008

Hackerman Award comes home
Cecilia Clementi earns honor named for former Rice president

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

For Cecilia Clementi, winning the Welch Foundation’s 2009 Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research has personal significance, since one of the first people she met upon coming to Houston was Hackerman himself.

Having been named a Hackerman Young Investigator at Rice in 2002, Clementi was given an office next to that of the former Rice president. “The first thing I did was go to say ‘Hi,’ because I was carrying his name in my position,” said Clementi, the Wiess Career Development Chair and associate professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering. “He was very charming. I liked him very much.”

	CECILIA CLEMENTI

Clementi has done his legacy proud. The theoretical physicist and biomolecular chemist won the prestigious award presented by the Robert A. Welch Foundation for advancing understanding of the mechanics of protein folding. Her research project seeks to create statistical models of how proteins combine and how they can be manipulated to serve a variety of tasks.

Understanding protein self-assembly in both coarse and fine detail could lead to breakthroughs in all kinds of fields, from energy storage to battling cancer.

One goal, said Clementi, is to develop tools that dynamically combine physics from the realm of quantum mechanics with much larger macroscopic simulations. “With the techniques we have developed so far, at least we can take the first step toward this kind of analysis,” she said. “I want to provide researchers with the tools that would allow them to observe how even tiny perturbations in an isolated part of a protein can lead to changes in its entire structure and function.” Such techniques would be critical for attacking biomedical problems.

Wiess School of Natural Sciences
Learn more about the award-winning research happening at Rice Clementi has an appreciation for the tools of science that few can match, having studied undergraduate physics in her native Florence, Italy, in the very building where Galileo Galilei was imprisoned by the Catholic Church for supporting Copernicus’ view that the Earth revolved around the sun. “It was very nice to start my training in the same place where modern physics began, because physics as we intend it today began with Galileo,” she said, noting that Galileo’s own tools are still there.

Clementi was the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant in 2004. She was awarded a prestigious NSF-wide Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation grant in October to continue her group’s investigation into macromolecular dynamics and functions.

The Hackerman Award, which comes with $100,000, has been given since 2002 to recognize young chemical scientists in Texas for their research. Andrew Barron, Rice’s Charles W. Duncan Jr.-Welch Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science, won the award in its first year, and Jianpeng Ma, associate professor in bioengineering, won in 2004.

The award will be presented to Clementi in a ceremony at Rice Feb. 3.

Hackerman, who served as Rice president from 1970 to 1985, was a chemist with expertise in the corrosion of metals. He died at 95 in June 2007.