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By Katie Neitz
Justin Hines, associate professor of chemistry, is the recipient of a prestigious Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
It’s a highly competitive award: A college can only nominate one faculty member annually, and only eight candidates received grants this year.
The award provides an unrestricted research grant of $60,000 to faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions “who are accomplished researchers and committed educators.” The funding will support Hines’ ongoing investigation of the biochemical basis of neurodegenerative diseases. (Learn more about Hines’ work.)
“I am very grateful for this award,” Hines says. “It is a five-year grant, which means it will provide a lot of opportunities for student involvement. It can support student travel to meetings and student research projects over the summer.”
From left, Lafayette President Alison Byerly, Provost Abu Rizvi, and Prof. Justin Hines
Currently, Hines has nine student researchers working in his lab. Four will be presenting their research in December at the American Society of Cell Biology’s annual meeting in San Diego.
“I love working with students in the lab to help them understand the context of their experiments, and I enjoy traveling with them to meetings,” Hines says. “It’s really beneficial for them to be able to communicate their results with people at other institutions from around the world. They get to interact with faculty members who might become their graduate school advisers and perhaps, one day, their colleagues.”
This award is just the latest endorsement of Hines’ work. In 2017, he received his second National Institutes of Health grant. Since joining the faculty of Lafayette in 2011, Hines has accumulated $750,000 in awards to support his research at the College.