Alexander von Humboldt Research Award

One-and-a-half years after his death, the many friends of Alexander von Humboldt established a Foundation in his name. Located in Berlin, its aim was to sponsor research travel abroad by German scholars. In continued until the depression of 1923 when it lost all of its capital. However by 1925 is was re-established, but with a new mission. Now its aim was to assist non-German scholars in undertaking postgraduate studies in Germany. After the collapse of the German Reich in 1945, the Foundation ceased its activities until December 10, 1953. On that date the Federal Republic of Germany, on the urging of former Humboldt guest-researchers, again re-established the Foundation. Originally set up to thank the United States for the generosity of the Marshall plan, the first rewardees were primarily Americans. Later the mission of the Foundation was expanded, and to date more than 20,000 scholars from 125 countries have been sponsored. The headquarters of the foundation are in Bonn-Bad Godesberg. There has always been a link to the right to their web site.

Of the many awards the Foundation offers, one of the most prestigious is the Humboldt Research award. From their web site:

"The award is granted in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date, to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in future. Eligible to be nominated are eminent foreign researchers at the peak of their academic careers and in leading positions.

Award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. The Humboldt Foundation grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards annually. Direct applications are not accepted. Nominations may be submitted by established academics in Germany. The award is valued at 60,000 EUR."

Well, Trisha was honored with this award. She was sponsored by Joe Howard, Anthony Hyman and Petra Schwille. Only because of the support provided by this award were we able to come to Germany. On March 28th she and the other 42 awardees gathered in Bamberg to officially receive their award. Here she is accepting the award from the President of the Foundation, Professor Dr. Helmut Schwarz.

From von Humboldt

She was honored in part because of her many accomplishments. From the ceremony:
Dr. Trisha Davis began her academic career studying calmodulin and calcium signaling. Her lab discovered that calmodulin has essential functions in chromosome segregation and establishment of cell polarity. She upended the paradigm that calmodulin only functions in a calcium-dependent manner when she demonstrated that calmodulin did not need to bind calcium to carry out these essential functions.

These discoveries sparked a new direction in her research. She began to study the molecular machines that segregate the genetic material at each cell division: centrosomes, microtubules and kinetochores. Dr. Davis and her lab studied centrosome assembly in yeast and extended this work to human cells. With her collaborator Kerry Bloom she discovered that, again contrary to the prevailing model, the yeast centrosome is a dynamic structure that remodels its components in a cell cycle dependent manner.

Microtubules are dynamic polymers that lose and gain thousands of subunits during mitosis as chromosomal attachments are tested and corrected. Dr. Davis’s current research focuses on how kinetochores remain attached to the constantly changing microtubule end. With her collaborator, Dr. Chip Asbury, she showed that one subcomplex of the kinetochore, the Dam1 complex, reconstitutes two important activities of the kinetochore. In vitro the purified Dam1 complex stays attached to dynamic microtubules and changes their dynamics. Dr. Davis led a multifaceted collaboration that included genetics, fluorescence microscopy, mass spectrometry, computational modeling and electron tomography to discover that phosphorylation of Dam1 at a novel site in the protein is required for attachment of kinetochores to the ends of microtubules.

Dr. Davis and her collaborator, Dr. Eric Muller, have pursued structural analyses of the mitotic spindle. They defined a new FRET metric to measure protein interactions in living cells. Using this metric, they were able to describe the structure of the yeast centrosome at a resolution not previously possible and not surpassed since. The new FRET metric has now been used in collaborations with Dr. Frank Uhlmann to study cohesin structure and Dr. David Agard to study the structure of the gamma-tubulin complex.

Dr. Davis is director of the Yeast Resource Center, which develops new technologies to study protein interactions. The Yeast Resource Center includes six co-investigators who develop new high-end technologies and make them accessible to scientists around the world through collaboration. The Yeast Resource Center has participated in hundreds of collaborations and publishes approximately 40 publications each year.

And why not another picture?

From von Humboldt