Willem Laursen, UW Biology Assistant Professor, has been awarded an early-career fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Awarded this year to 126 of the most innovative young scientists across the U.S. and Canada, the Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career scholars. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising early-career researchers to its ranks.
Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.
Willem’s research in the Department of Biology is focused on understanding how animals detect and respond to sensory cues in their environment. Using genetic manipulation, neurophysiology and behavioral analyses, the lab’s current focus is to understand how disease vector mosquitoes use sensory cues to locate hosts, mates and egg-laying sites.
“It is an honor to be selected as a Sloan Fellow. This award will support our lab’s research on the role of the mosquito gustatory, or taste, system in critical behaviors, such as blood feeding. While mosquitoes use all of their senses to efficiently locate hosts, their taste system is surprisingly understudied. By examining the gustatory systems of blood-feeding insects, we hope to better understand how taste cues on the skin and in the blood are detected and used to guide their specialized behaviors, lines of inquiry that could ultimately identify new targets for controlling the spread of disease,” Laursen said.