Evan Macosko has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a grant that funds high-risk, high-reward projects from early-career investigators. The proposed project must be deemed creative and high-impact, and since the investigator cannot have received a previous R01, preliminary data is optional. The New Innovators are considered to be among the best and brightest newcomers to PI-dom and each receive a bio on the NIH website, along with $300K per year of flexible spending for their lab.

Evan has been a co-PI on other grants, but this award is his first major grant as a solo PI. The project he proposed was Slide-seq, a technique to investigate gene expression while preserving spatial resolution or put another way: to see which RNA is where across a tissue. He says the most challenging thing about writing this grant was taking an idea that had little experimental support and portraying it as feasible and exciting.

He is incredibly grateful to our lab and Steve, and believes his experience here was integral to getting the grant. Evan, a McCarroll lab alumnus, started his own lab at the Stanley Center over a year ago. It has since grown to 8 people, including students, post-docs, and research staff. He loves it at the Stanley Center, citing his nice lab neighbors and good community. It’s a research center that is growing quickly, and he’s excited to be involved with getting it off the ground.