Professor wins Dreyfus award

Miller

enjamin Miller, assistant professor of chemistry, has won the 2001 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, given to support the teaching and research careers of young faculty researchers. Miller's research, including work on the development of a bandage that can alert the wearer to the presence of harmful bacteria, earns him the $60,000 honor.

The award recognizes Miller's work in synthesizing molecules that bind with only certain types of sugar molecules. Practical applications of this research range from development of certain vaccines to a food packaging design that can identify contaminated food.

"What complicates this research is that different sugars look very, very similar, chemically," says Miller. "And to make it worse, they all look very much like water."

Miller's five-year research into differentiating different types of sugars also has led to the development of the "smart bandage" that can identify harmful bacteria present in a wound or cut.

Currently, Miller is developing a model of a sand-grain-sized detector that determine if a bacterium is Gram negative or Gram positive--the first step in deciding which type of antibiotics are needed. The detector is the first major improvement in differentiating bacteria since the Gram test was devised more than a century ago. Miller plans to use the award to search for more effective ways to detect bacteria such as salmonella, listeria, and terapathogenic E. coli.

The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award was founded in 1969 to encourage young faculty members' research in the chemical sciences while maintaining a solid commitment to the education of students. Though only one researcher can be nominated from any given institution, three of this year's 15 award recipients have University connections. In addition to Miller, Matthew Shair '90 of Harvard University was honored for his work in the synthesis of complex molecules, and Philip Bevilacqua '89 (MS), '93 (PhD) of Pennsylvania State University was honored for research into ribosome folds.

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