Inside Duke Medicine

Seok-Yong Lee wins two more awards

Seok-Yong Lee, Ph.D. -- an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry, member of the Duke Ion Channel Research Unit (ICRU) and winner of three major awards in 2010 -- has received two additional honors so far in 2011 for his work in ion channel science.

On Feb. 15, the announcement came that Lee was selected to be a 2011 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is one of the 118 selected this year for the fellowship, which provides early-career scientists and scholars recognition for their achievements and potential to contribute in their field. Lee won $50,000 along with the fellowship recognition, for his promising work in neuroscience.

“I am happy to share this good news, which will benefit the research I do in biochemistry and in the ICRU,” he said.

Richard Brennan, Ph.D., chair of biochemistry, said, “This is an impressive testament to the terrific research that you have done already and to the confidence in the scientific community that you will continue to do great work in your own laboratory.”

"These awards are well-deserved and it is appropriate that Seok-Yong's work in ion channels is being recognized by so many,” said Geoffrey Pitt, M.D., Ph.D., director of the ICRU and an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology.

His recent 2011 Basil O’Connor Award grant, given by the March of Dimes, provides up to $75,000 per year for a duration of two years. This grant will provide salary support for technical help.

The O’Connor Award is designed to support young scientists just embarking on their independent research careers and is limited to those holding recent faculty appointments. The applicants' research must dovetail with the March of Dime Foundation’s interests in improving the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality.

With the Basil O-Connor Award, the Lee lab plans to study the mechanism of regulation of a cardiac potassium ion channel by X-ray crystallography and electrophysiology.

“Dysfunction of this channel regulation leads to cardiac arrhythmia, deafness, and sudden death in newborns, so understanding the mechanism of regulation will be important,” Lee said.

Ion channels are miniscule channels across which ions -- molecules with an electrical charge -- flow to cause other actions to occur among cells. Many parts of the body, including the brain and the heart, work thanks to these lightning-quick channels. The channels operate under many different conditions such as electrical voltage, a ligand binding to a cell receptor, temperature change, pH and mechanical tension (pressure of a sharp object, for example).

In October 2010, Lee was awarded an Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation award “for the purpose of advancing knowledge in the various fields of medical and health research.” Earlier in 2010, he won both the Klingenstein Award for neuroscience research and the McKnight Scholar Award to support his biochemical research into neuroscience.

To date, his five awards total more than $750,000 for his work, which ranges from the congenital heart disorder to epilepsy research to investigating an ion channel that regulates human sperm maturation and pathogenic microbe destruction.