Brian Crane, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, has been named a recipient of two major research awards: the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program award and a Searle Scholars Program grant.

The NSF award, for $598,180 over five years, will support his exploration of the controlled movement of charge, which he describes as "ultimately, the essence of life." Nature's ability to tune the reactivity of metal centers in proteins and to direct electron flow within and between proteins is controlled by the vast number of states available to the polypeptide chain. (A variety of proteins contain metal centers, generally performing functions ranging from the maintenance of structural integrity to catalysis.) The goal of Crane's research is to develop and apply new photochemical methods for studying the structural basis of oxidation-reduction chemistry and long-range electron transfer in biology.

The NSF award is the agency's most prestigious for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports the early-career development activities of promising teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

As a Searle Scholar, Crane will receive a grant of $80,000 a year for three years to support his research into the structural chemistry of biological timing.

The award will support Crane's research program into circadian rhythms, the periodic light or temperature cues by which people anticipate changes in their environment, such as time perception and "jet lag." His research on circadian clock components attempts to understand behavior in terms of structures and reactivities of individual molecules. Although molecular genetics research has identified many clock components in plants, fungi and mammals, details of their structures, interactions and chemistries remain to be understood. Because the essence of clock function concerns how information is transferred, Crane aims to determine the structures of the functionally relevant protein complexes.

The Searle program was established in 1980 and was funded by the estates of John. G. Searle and his wife. John Searle was the grandson of the founder of G.D. Searle, the international pharmaceuticals concern, now a unit of Monsanto Co. The annual awards of 15 three-year grants are intended to support independent research by exceptional young faculty in the biomedical sciences and chemistry.

Crane obtained his B.Sc. at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1990 and his Ph.D. in macromolecular and cellular structure and chemistry at Scripps Research Institute in 1996. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 2000 he was a research associate at the California Institute of Technology's Beckman Institute. In 2000 he won a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Young Faculty Award, and this year he was granted a Research Corp. Research Innovation Award.