Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship Award

Jaewon Huh joined the Danuser lab as a postdoctoral fellow in January 2017. This month he was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). The award will provide over $160,000 to support Huh's research that applies financial mathematics to molecular cell biology, creating new frameworks to decipher signal transduction.

Huh received his PhD in Statistics from Seoul National University. Despite his focus on numbers, Huh said, "As a regular reader of journals like Nature and Science, I got particularly interested in questions of cell regulation and signal transduction. I have always scouted for opportunities to put math in applications of science." Understanding that the vastness of data in the life sciences has created a growing demand for advanced computational analysis and mathematical modeling, Huh said, "I felt particularly compelled to contribute as a mathematician to the field of molecular cell biology." That desire led him to the Danuser lab at UT Southwestern. 

The HFSP postdoctoral fellowship award will allow Huh, using the example of GEF-GTPase interaction networks, to develop novel numerical frameworks for deciphering signal transduction in pathways with a high level of redundancy and non-linear coupling among components. Such paradigm-shifting work is the focus of the Human Frontier Science Program, which for 20 years has funded high-risk research at the frontiers of modern life sciences.