Friday February 3, 2023
University of California, Merced —
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given Professor Stephanie Woo the CAREER award to help her delve into congenital birth defects by looking at the embryonic cells of zebrafish.
Woo is the 32nd researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award.
CAREER awards are among the NSF’s most prestigious awards. They are given through the Faculty Early Career Development Program to recognize untenured faculty members as teacher-scholars. Early career faculty members are selected based on three factors: the strength of their research proposals; their potential to serve as academic role models in research and education; and their leadership in their fields and organizations.
The NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems awarded Woo $1 million over the next five years for the project “Contact Inhibition of Locomotion as a Positioning Mechanism During Endoderm Morphogenesis.”
The project will focus on how a population of embryonic cells called endodermal cells work together to build a tissue that will eventually become parts of the gastrointestinal and respiratory systems.