NYU physicist Gershow receives NIH's 'New Innovator' award

Marc Gershow, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Physics, has received a highly competitive "New Innovator" Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The award, nearly $2.4 million over five years, is part of NIH's High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, which supports "exceptional investigators pursuing bold research projects that span the broad mission of the NIH," the agency said in announcing this year's grants.

"This program has consistently produced research that revolutionized scientific fields by giving investigators the freedom to take risks and explore potentially groundbreaking concepts," said NIH Director Francis S. Collins. "We look forward to the remarkable advances in biomedical research the 2015 awardees will make."

The New Innovator Award, established in 2007, is designed to support creative new investigators with highly innovative research ideas at an early stage of their careers. Gershow's award is one of 41 bestowed by the NIH this year.

Gershow applies methods from physics, engineering, and computer vision to learn how the brain processes information and makes decisions. His lab will study how fruit fly larvae use the sense of smell to seek out or avoid odor sources, using light to read and control individual neurons in moving larvae.

More information on current awardees and the program, please visit: http://commonfund.nih.gov/highrisk.

Provided by New York University