Eric Nacsa receives 2024 NIGMS MIRA grant
Eric Nacsa, assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, has been honored with a 2024 Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). His project is titled “Harnessing the Latent Potential of Radical Migration to Drive Synthetic Innovation.”
As part of the project, Nacsa’s research group is developing faster and more effective methods to construct the complex molecular structures that form the basis of medicines, agrochemicals, and other valuable chemical products.
“The basis for our research is to harness the latent advantages of long known but underleveraged processes by which reactive molecules called radicals rearrange their bonds,” Nacsa said. “There is evidence that these processes could form chemical bonds in a way that addresses key bottlenecks that plague the strategies currently used to make these products. However, adapting these rearrangements to this end requires a conceptually different approach to using common chemical building blocks and designing manufacturing protocols. Owing to the new approaches we have been studying, it may become possible to discover, develop, and market new medicines more quickly.”
The MIRA grant provides about $1.9M in funding to Nacsa and his lab group over the next five years. The grant requires at least fifty-one percent of the lab’s efforts to be dedicated to this research direction. It also provides significant flexibility, allowing researchers to pursue whatever projects they believe will be most impactful instead of committing them to specific projects and aims.
Nacsa was previously honored with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2024, and a Doctoral New Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund in 2022.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2019, Nacsa was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. His postdoctoral advisor, David MacMillan, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Nacsa earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Harvey Mudd College in 2010 and a doctoral degree in chemistry at Columbia University in 2015.
About NIGMS and the MIRA grant
NIGMS is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary medical research agency of the federal government and a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and it supports research that increases our understanding of biological processes and initiates advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. MIRA grants provide widely distributed support, stability, and the chance for innovative research in laboratories of established, new, or early-stage investigators that fall within the mission of NIGMS. The goal of MIRA is to help enhance scientific productivity so that important breakthroughs are not delayed.