Chris Alabi is the recipient of a 2016 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF)

The CAREER award is the most prestigious recognition given by the NSF to faculty members early in their academic careers. It is designed to support the development of junior faculty of exceptional promise who demonstrate creativity in research.  The award also recognizes junior members of the faculty who show early promise in integrating their research and education goals within the context of the mission of the university.

Chris Alabi’s NSF Career proposal titled 'Precise Assembly and Evaluation of Sequence-Defined Macromolecular Architectures’ seeks to understand how molecular composition and sequence influence macromolecular assembly, chain dynamics and ultimately chemical and biological properties. His longer term goal is to leverage this understanding to engineer synthetic macromolecular superstructures that may be used as active biological ligands and scaffolds. A particularly exciting component of the project will employ a powerful sequence-defined oligo-thioetheramide (oligo-TEA) molecular platform pioneered in the Alabi lab to create synthetic antibacterials and RNA delivery agents. Alabi’s work on antibacterial oligoTEA macrocycles will soon appear in Nature Chemistry.