Dr. Maijia Liao receives a 2022 Career Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund

June 13, 2022

Dr. Maijia Liao, a postdoctoral associate in the Howard lab, received a 2022 Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF). The BWF’s Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (CASI) provide $500,000 over the span of 5 years to fund the late-stage postdoctoral training and the first three years of early faculty career of the awardees. The CASI is given to researchers who have transitioned from graduate work in physical, mathematical, and computational sciences into postdoctoral work in the biological sciences.

Dr. Liao earned her undergraduate degree in physics at Nanjing University, then she studied soft matter physics at the Hong King University of Science and Technology for her PhD work. She decided to join the Howard lab as a postdoctoral associate so she could use her experience in soft matter physics to perform biophysics research and focus her research on living organisms. Specifically, her project in the Howard lab explores the fundamental rules that govern the morphology of neuronal dendrites and incorporates an interdisciplinary approach pulling from her various scientific backgrounds. She is currently focusing on determining a morphological scaling law which describes the systemic narrowing of dendrite diameters. The CASI will support this work and her future projects.

Congratulations to Dr. Maijia Liao for receiving this prestigious award!

By Jake Thrasher