image: TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology) announces its top researchers in the state with annual Edith and Peter O'Donnell Awards. view more
Credit: Please give a "Photo courtesy of TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology)."
Understanding the microbiome’s effect on cancer treatment. Building multi-hazard resilience models to protect infrastructure from extreme weather-related events. Identifying new treatment paths for parasitic worms devastating the developing world. Mapping and understanding the architecture of the human genome and its potential for curing disease. Innovating new seismic survey technology for the oil and gas industry that leaves less of an environmental impact and increases efficiency.
These are the discoveries by Texas’ rising stars in research being honored with the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards by TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology):
• Medicine: Jennifer Wargo, M.D., The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
• Engineering: Jamie Padgett, Ph.D., Rice University
• Biological Sciences: James J. Collins III, Ph.D., UT Southwestern Medical Center
• Physical Sciences: Erez Lieberman Aiden, Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine
• Technology Innovation: Chengbo Li, Ph.D., ConocoPhillips
“The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards aim to identify rising stars in Texas research to support their careers moving forward and there is no question that this year’s recipients are incredible researchers who epitomize the Texas can-do spirit,” said Edith and Peter O’Donnell Committee Chair Ann Beal Salamone (NAE), Chairman of the Board at Rochal Industries. “Our elite group of past O’Donnell recipients have a spectacular track record of going on to national academy election and benefiting from the mentorship and awareness these awards bring to the groundbreaking research happening in our state. These recipients fit into the same mold and we can’t wait to see to see where their discoveries lead and hope to welcome them as TAMEST Members in the years to come."
Over $1.5 million has been awarded to more than 70 recipients in the categories of medicine, engineering, biological sciences, physical sciences and technology innovation since the inception of the O'Donnell Awards in 2006. Fifteen O’Donnell Awards Recipients have gone on to be elected to the National Academies, including three who hold dual academy elections.
The 2023 recipients will be honored at the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, May 24, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. CT and will give presentations on their research preceding the award ceremony at the TAMEST 2023 Annual Conference, Forward Texas – Accelerating Change, at the InterContinental Medical Center in Houston, Texas.
All are encouraged to attend the ceremony and the TAMEST Conference.
Learn more about the 2023 O’Donnell Awards recipients:
• Medicine: Jennifer Wargo, M.D., The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
View a video on Dr. Wargo's groundbreaking research here.
World-renowned physician scientist Jennifer Wargo, M.D., professor of Surgical Oncology and Genomic Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Medicine from TAMEST. She was chosen for her seminal contributions to the understanding of how the microbiome influences responses to immunotherapy and other forms of cancer treatment.
Throughout her career, Dr. Wargo has advanced important research that contributed to the understanding of how best to combine targeted therapy with immunotherapy for cancer, which paved the way for several novel combination treatment approaches. In her research to better understand why all patients don’t respond equally well to immunotherapy, she discovered the important connection between treatment outcomes and a patient’s gut microbiome.
Dr. Wargo’s lab studied patients with melanoma who were treated with immunotherapy, and found the patients who responded best to immunotherapy treatments had a greater diversity of microbes within their gut, which is generally associated with overall gut health. In addition to this, they found that patients who responded best to immunotherapy had different microbes within their gut. They translated these findings with others, demonstrating that modulation of gut microbes (via fecal microbiota transplant) could promote response in patients who are otherwise resistant to immunotherapy. These findings were published in Science in 2018 and 2021.
This discovery created the path forward to see how changes to the microbiome can positively impact immunity and immunotherapy response during cancer treatments. In a follow-up study also published in Science, Dr. Wargo and colleagues demonstrated that sufficient dietary fiber intake (of at least 20 grams per day), which can support a healthy gut microbiome, was associated with improved immunotherapy responses in patients with melanoma. These findings inspired ongoing trials to prospectively evaluate the impact of high-fiber diet on microbiome content and immunotherapy responses in patients with melanoma and other cancers.
“From the clinic to the lab, Dr. Wargo has dedicated her life to cancer patients and to figuring out how treatment with immunotherapy and other forms of cancer therapy can improve outcomes,” said Nominator and Nobel Laureate James P. Allison, Ph.D. (NAM, NAS), Regental Professor and Chair of Immunology, and Director of the James P. Allison Institute at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “She’s developed her own insightful research program and has led groundbreaking work to give us new insights into the importance of gut and other microbes in modulating immunity and immunotherapy response. The therapeutic implications Dr. Wargo’s research has for the future of cancer treatments is incredibly promising, with applications for a wide range of cancers.”
• Engineering: Jamie Padgett, Ph.D., Rice University
View a video on Dr. Padgett's groundbreaking research here.
Leading structural engineer Jamie Padgett, Ph.D., Stanley C. Moore Professor, Rice University, is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from TAMEST. She was chosen for her life-saving research in infrastructure sustainability and resiliency in hazard-prone regions.
Dr. Padgett’s research enhances public safety and provides new methods for multi-hazard resilience modeling. Instead of looking at a single threat, like how a bridge will perform in an earthquake, her research looks at multiple hazards or multiple threats that a system might be exposed to over time.
In addition to physical damage that hazards impose on structures, she looks at how infrastructure performance will affect community resiliency. Her methods reveal strategies to enhance reliability and improve the sustainability of critical community infrastructure, such as bridges, intermodal transportation systems, tank farms, industrial facilities and more.
“Dr. Padgett is exceptionally talented and has always been at the forefront of not just looking at the built environment as it relates to natural hazards but also looks at how our social systems and behaviors interact and are impacted as well,” said Nominator Reginald DesRoches, Ph.D. (NAE), President and Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University. “Dr. Padgett gets that you can’t look at everything in silos, especially when it comes to infrastructure systems. You must look at the interdependencies and come up with a multi-hazard approach, which makes the work much more complex.”
• Biological Sciences: James J. Collins III, Ph.D., UT Southwestern Medical Center
View a video on Dr. Collins' groundbreaking research here.
James J. Collins III, Ph.D., Associate Professor, UT Southwestern Medical Center, is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences from TAMEST. He was chosen for widening the understanding of schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms that infect hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, including children.
Schistosomes are parasitic worms that live in certain types of freshwater snails and enter an individual when skin encounters contaminated freshwater through wading, swimming, bathing, or drinking. The disease affects almost 240 million annually and is second only to malaria as the most devastating parasitic disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The disease becomes progressively worse over time as the female parasitic worms lay millions of eggs inside the host, which cause debilitating inflammatory responses and scarring as more and more eggs get trapped in the liver, intestines or even the brain. After years of infection, the parasite can also damage the liver, intestines, lungs and bladder as well as cause anemia, malnutrition and learning difficulties in children.
Dr. Collins was the first to be able to set up the culture conditions to monitor the reproductive cycle of the worms without having to pass it through a host. In doing so, he has transformed society’s understanding of schistosomes by discovering and isolating the pheromone or signal used when male worms contact a female. Experts believe understanding and isolating the exchange provides a great new direction for the field and may cause relief to the millions it effects each year in developing nations.
“The only current treatment for schistosomes targets the worms themselves, not the eggs that can survive 30 years in the body, creating a debilitating cycle in patients even with treatment,” said Nominator David J. Mangelsdorf, Ph.D. (NAS), Alfred G. Gilman Distinguished Chair of Pharmacology, UT Southwestern Medical Center. “Dr. Collins is a bold visionary who has not only identified new therapeutic avenues against these parasites by focusing instead on the eggs and reproduction but he has uncovered new paradigms in cell signaling and developmental biology as well. He and his team have laid the groundwork toward something that will eventually break the cycle of egg laying and provide a better outlook for the disease.”
• Physical Sciences: Erez Lieberman Aiden, Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine
View a video on Dr. Aiden's groundbreaking research here.
World-leading biophysical scientist Erez Lieberman Aiden, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Physical Sciences from TAMEST. He was chosen for dramatically impacting the understanding of genomic 3D structures and the role and processes of the human genome.
Dr. Aiden’s research looks at the physical architecture of the human genome, which is over two meters long and folds up to fit inside a microscopic cell nucleus, and studies how the folding process is tied to governing gene regulation and how cells function.
The human body holds approximately 20,000 genes, or recipes for the proteins that direct all the processes that make up the human body. However, the majority of the genome is made up of “dark matter,” without protein-code information, where loops and folds are hidden that can control the expression of genes. Dr. Aiden and his collaborators have created a series of methods to map and modify the looping and folding of the genome, which allows him to explore and alter how genes are turned on and off.
By understanding how the genome folds and functions, and how its dark matter can be manipulated, Dr. Aiden is providing insight into all elements of life processes. His team is currently working at Baylor College of Medicine to determine how this work can be applied to genome sequences in clinical settings and the hope is that it will eventually be used to target dark matter in the body to treat disease.
“Dr. Aiden’s research has been no less than transformative and his multidisciplinary approach to science has been key to his discoveries,” said Nominator and TAMEST 2023 Board President Brendan Lee, M.D., Ph.D. (NAM), Professor and Chair of Molecular and Human Genetics and Robert and Janice McNair Endowed Chair in Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine. “He doesn’t just use genetics, he uses computation, physics, and other specialties to tackle these big questions of how the human genome folds and fits inside a single cell nucleus and how manipulating that process leads to potential clinical application. The impact of this work is just unbelievable.”
• Technology Innovation: Chengbo Li, Ph.D., ConocoPhillips
View a video on Dr. Li's groundbreaking research here.
ConocoPhillips Inventor Chengbo Li, Ph.D., is the recipient of the 2023 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Technology Innovation from TAMEST. He was chosen for his innovations in industry-leading Compressive Seismic Imaging (CSI) technology and the development of core algorithms and software infrastructure.
Exploration seismology is one of the most powerful tools in the oil and gas industry. It takes images of the earth through seismic surveys to create a comprehensive model of subsections of the earth. Larger surveys require thousands of receivers creating seismic waves for each shot and take thousands of shots in a grid pattern to create the seismic data.
Dr. Li found a way with CSI technology to lessen the labor and environmental footprint of the seismic survey process. Instead of working in a regular grid, CSI sets the sensors and shots in a non-uniform but optimal way and utilizes mathematical optimization to reconstruct the survey grid using dramatically fewer data points than conventional methods. Doing so has changed the landscape of seismic surveys by tremendously reducing the number of channels, shots and days required to complete the process.
In practice, the innovative CSI technology Dr. Li helped develop uses less than half of the source and receiver points versus conventional technology, with optimized survey positions to produce the same or improved quality of subsurface image. Since 2015, ConocoPhillips has used its CSI technology on approximately 30 seismic surveys, improving exploration, development and production performance by providing high resolution seismic data with less environmental footprint and lower seismic acquisition costs (with direct savings of over $250 million).
“When you look at the research in the geophysical imaging, it is very clear that Dr. Li’s work is redefining the industry standard for seismic surveying,” said Nominator Jie Zhang, Ph.D. (NAE), Founder and Chief Scientist, GeoTomo LLC. “This CSI technology allows the oil and gas industry to produce these seismic surveys in less time, with less shots and receivers, and most importantly, with less of an environmental impact. It really has and will transform the way we do our work moving forward.”
The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards annually recognize rising star Texas researchers who are addressing the essential role that science and technology play in society and whose work meets the highest standards of exemplary professional performance, creativity and resourcefulness.
Thanks to a $1.15 million gift from the O’Donnell Foundation in 2022, the O’Donnell Awards have expanded to include an additional science award. The awards now recognize recipients in the categories of Medicine, Engineering, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences and Technology Innovation. (Previously, the TAMEST O’Donnell Awards rotated its science award between physical and biological sciences every year.)
The Edith and Peter O’Donnell Awards are made possible by the O’Donnell Awards Endowment Fund, established in 2005 through the generous support of several individuals and organizations. View a full list of supporters here.
About TAMEST:
TAMEST was co-founded in 2004 by the Honorable Kay Bailey Hutchison and Nobel Laureates Michael S. Brown, M.D., and Richard E. Smalley, Ph.D. With more than 330 members and 18 member institutions, TAMEST is composed of the Texas-based members of the three National Academies (National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences), the Royal Society and the state’s 9 Nobel Laureates. We bring together the state’s brightest minds in medicine, engineering, science and technology to foster collaboration, and to advance research, innovation and business in Texas.
TAMEST’s unique interdisciplinary model has become an effective recruitment tool for top research and development centers across Texas. Since our founding, more than 275 TAMEST members have been inducted into the National Academies or relocated to Texas.
###