Susan Mango uses expensive equipment for her research at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, but with the drop in the economy she said it can be difficult to find funding for research.
Now, thanks to a $500,000 award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mango will have additional funding coming in for the next five years.
Mango received notice last week that she was one of 25 researchers from across the nation to be named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
“I was basically sitting in my office doing some very mundane work and got this call out of the blue,” she said. “It’s kind of a funny award. You don’t apply for it. You don’t even know you’ve been nominated.”
Just last week, Mango coauthored a study published in the Current Biology Journal about increasing the life span of worms.
Brad Cairns, an oncological sciences professor at the U, teaches a class with Mango and said he thinks the U nominated her for the award.
“I think she was selected for the creative way she thinks about solving important problems in developmental biology,” Cairns said. “She is a totally deserving winner8212;I’m thrilled for her.”
Cairns said Mango’s work has answered three different questions in developmental biology that don’t usually connect.
Mango has worked on how the body makes an organ, how an organism’s metabolism and feeding affects aging and how an organism chooses the head and tail when an embryo is fertilized.
“It’s the location of where the sperm enters the egg,” Cairn said. “It turns out, the sperm carries a special protein that ends up initiating change.”
The MacArthur Foundation hands out the five-year $500,000 awards every year to men and women in various professions. This year’s list has an eclectic selection of winners, including a novelist, a musical instrument inventor and an urban farmer.
“The MacArthur Fellows Program celebrates extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement,” said Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, in a statement.
Mango also runs the Developmental Biology Training program that provides funding for student researchers. The program receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and helps students attend lectures to further their education.
The first payment for the award comes in January. Mango said she’s excited to use it.
“I’m still a little speechless,” Mango said. “It’s really delightful. In part, people like your research, which you don’t hear about as much in science.”
