Yale’s Goodman receives New Innovator Award from NIH

Andrew Goodman, assistant professor in the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Microbial Diversity Institute at the Yale West Campus, has received a 2012 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Presented by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the honor aims to encourage new laboratories to launch innovative biomedical and behavioral research.

The award totals $1.5 million in direct costs over a five-year period,  and will enable Goodman and his team to develop new approaches to understand how the body’s resident bacteria impact human health. These bacterial communities vary widely between people, but the consequences of this variation are difficult to determine. Goodman’s team will use germ-free mice raised without any microbes of their own to investigate whether differences in gut bacterial community composition — as well as differences in our genome sequences — impact how drugs are metabolized.

“This support will allow us to expand our research program in a new direction,” Goodman said. “West Campus is a great place explore these questions with colleagues in the Microbial Diversity, Systems Biology, and Chemical Biology Institutes from both the medical school and main campus.”