Mei Hong wins 2021 Nakanishi Award from the American Chemical Society

Professor Mei Hong has been selected by the American Chemical Society (ACS) as the winner of the 2021 Nakanishi Award. Sponsored by the Nakanishi Prize Endowment, this award is given in recognition of application of spectroscopy to biological phenomena. Recipients of ACS National Awards will be honored at the awards ceremony on Tuesday, March 23, 2021, in conjunction with the ACS 2021 Spring National Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

The Hong group develops and applies high-resolution solid-state NMR spectroscopy to elucidate the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules, with an emphasis on membrane proteins. We design magic-angle-spinning NMR techniques that measure inter-atomic distances and molecular motions, and apply these techniques to problems in biology, pharmacology, and biomaterials. We have a long-standing interest in ion channels and curvature-inducing membrane proteins. We are also investigating the polysaccharide structures in energy-rich plant cell walls and amyloid proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases. We study these complex noncrystalline proteins and carbohydrates in their native environments, at atomic resolution, with both structural and dynamical details, from which we obtain mechanistic insights that are rarely available from other structural techniques.