image: HaoSheng Sun, Ph.D.
Credit: UAB
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – HaoSheng Sun, Ph.D., has been awarded a highly competitive National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer award from the NIH Common Fund.
Sun’s five-year Avenir Award through the National Institute on Drug Abuse will provide $445,000 per year in direct and indirect costs. The NIDA Avenir Awards are designed to stimulate innovation and potentially transformative research from early stage investigators. Sun is an assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology.
“Avenir” is the French word for “future,” and these awards represent NIDA’s commitment to supporting researchers who represent the future of addiction science. Sun’s proposal is titled “High-throughput identification and characterization of conserved regulators of drug-induced plasticity using single-neuron resolution atlases of the complete Caenorhabditis elegans nervous system.”
C. elegans is a transparent roundworm that is about 1 millimeter long and has exactly 302 neurons. C. elegans has been a model that has led to fundamental biological insights and discoveries for 50-plus years.
“What we are basically proposing is to leverage all the simplicity and ease of the worm model to see if we can understand evolutionarily conserved mechanisms that underlie how repeated drug exposure — specifically cocaine in our proposal — leads to long-lasting changes in the brain,” Sun said. “Once established, we can expand to other drugs as well as set up large-scale high-throughput platforms for drug discovery purposes.”
Sun’s Avenir award is under NIDA’s program on the genetics and epigenetics of substance use.
The NIH Common Fund is a funding entity within NIH that supports bold scientific programs that catalyze discovery across all biomedical and behavioral research. These programs create a space where investigators and multiple NIH Institutes and Centers collaborate on innovative research expected to address high-priority challenges for the NIH as a whole and make a broader impact in the scientific community.
Last year, Sun was named to the inaugural class of Freeman Hrabowski scholars by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The 31 Freeman Hrabowski scholars were appointed to a five-year term, renewable for a second five-year term after a successful progress evaluation, with each scholar receiving up to $8.6 million over 10 years, including full salary, benefits, a research budget and scientific equipment.
HHMI named the program in honor of Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a major force in increasing the number of scientists, engineers and physicians from backgrounds underrepresented in science in the United States. HHMI announced the launch of the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars program in May 2022.
Hrabowski grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, and was part of the Children’s Crusade for civil rights as a 12-year-old in 1963. Both his parents were teachers, and Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with high honors in mathematics when he was 19.
At UAB, Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology is a department in the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine.