Burroughs Wellcome Fund awards go to Andrew Goodman, Christina Woo

Andrew Goodman, an assistant professor of microbial pathogenesis, and Christina Woo, a recent Ph.D. graduate in chemistry, are among the winners of Burroughs Wellcome Fund awards announced this week.

Goodman and Woo each will receive a $500,000 grant over five years to conduct biomedical research. In total, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund committed $22.5 million to 50 researchers in four competitive award programs.

Goodman’s award came in the “Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease” program. Goodman teaches in the Yale Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and he is a member of the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale’s West Campus.

“The award will allow our team to conduct new studies to understand how resident gut microbial communities determine the outcome of pathogen infection,” Goodman said. “It is a great honor and I’m very grateful to the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation.”

Woo, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford, was a graduate student in chemistry at Yale, working with Professor Seth Herzon. Woo’s grant was part of the “Career Awards at the Scientific Interface” program.

“My proposal seeks to address challenges I first identified in Seth’s lab at Yale, and combines techniques that I acquired during my graduate and postdoctoral periods,” Woo said. “I am very excited and humbled to be selected as a BWF CASI fellow as I embark into the new area of precision pharmacology.”

“This is well-deserved recognition of Christina’s track record and potential as an independent investigator,” Herzon said. “She has an outstanding skill set, and she’s in a great position to tackle challenging, interdisciplinary problems.”