2024 Joanna Fowler Award Winners Announced
Awardees selected for outstanding academic performance, outreach and mentoring, and impact on Brookhaven Lab
September 3, 2024
The Chemistry Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Brookhaven Women in Science (BWIS) have named Paris Watson of Johns Hopkins University, Michele Myong of Brookhaven Lab, and Edelmy Marin Bernardez of Stony Brook University as the recipients of the 2024 Joanna Fowler Award in the Chemical and Biochemical Sciences. Watson, Myong, and Marin Bernardez will each receive an award of $3,500, funded by BWIS and Brookhaven Lab’s Chemistry Division, Energy & Photon Sciences Directorate, and Human Resources.
About the Joanna Fowler Award
The Joanna Fowler Award in the Chemical and Biochemical Sciences recognizes an outstanding early career (graduate student or postdoctoral) woman scientist who has advanced the chemical or biochemical sciences through research conducted at, or in collaboration with, Brookhaven Lab. The award annually recognizes one or more young women scientists for work conducted while she was a graduate student or a postdoctoral research associate who collaborated with Brookhaven scientists; worked at Brookhaven as a Lab-funded graduate student or research associate; or was a user at a Brookhaven Lab user facility.
Joanna S. Fowler is a former member of the Lab’s Chemistry, Medical, and Biology Departments (1969-2014) and a former leader of Brookhaven Lab’s Radiotracer Chemistry, Instrumentation, and Biological Imaging Program. Fowler was a leader in developing radiotracers for biomedical imaging. She pioneered the application of radiotracers for noninvasive brain imaging in research aimed at understanding the mechanisms behind addiction. Among her accomplishments, she played a leading role in the development and use of fluorine-18-labeled 2-deoxy-2-fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) as a radiotracer for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. FDG has since become a mainstay of PET imaging in medicine, particularly for cancer diagnosis. Today, Fowler’s many successes serve as an exemplary model for other young scientists.
About the 2024 Recipients
Paris Watson is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Gira Bhabha and Damian Ekiert at Johns Hopkins University. She obtained a Bachelor of Biomedical Science from Victoria University of Wellington and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, where she worked in the laboratory of David Christianson. She is an experienced user of the macromolecular crystallography beamlines at the National Light Source Synchrotron-II (NSLS-II). During her Ph.D., she solved high-resolution protein-inhibitor complexes to study the selective inhibition of histone deacetylase 6.
Watson is passionate about mentorship. During her Ph.D., she served as president of the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative Women+ in Chemistry and was a member of the organizational committee working with Merck scientists for the “You Belong in Chemistry” initiative for three years. She also chaired the biannual Women in STEM at Penn Symposium. Paris has mentored undergraduate students and volunteered in programs for outreach to elementary and middle school students.
Michele Myong is a postdoctoral researcher in the Electron- and Photo-Induced Processes group in the Chemistry Division at Brookhaven Lab. She has a B.A. in chemistry from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Northwestern University. She currently studies solar energy conversion by using picosecond pulse radiolysis at the Laser Electron Accelerator Facility to determine the redox potentials of molecules to millivolt precision for improved organic photovoltaics.
Myong is committed to making STEM more inclusive – she is a mentor for the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program and the Society of Women Engineers. As part of Project SHORT (Students for Higher-Ed Opportunities and Representation in Training), she helps international students who are applying to Ph.D. programs with their graduate school applications and has advocated for mental health resources to support women in graduate school.
Edelmy Marin Bernardez is a chemistry Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University (SBU), co-advised by Esther Takeuchi, Kenneth Takeuchi, and Amy Marschilok. Her interdisciplinary research integrates chemistry, materials science, and engineering to advance energy storage devices. As a junior investigator at the Center for Mesoscale Transport Properties, she collaborates with institutions, including Brookhaven Lab, and utilizes facilities such as the NSLS-II and Interdisciplinary Science Building. She obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from Xavier University of Louisiana.
Marin Bernardez is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship since 2022 and the Dr. W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship since 2020. Her aspirations are centered around making energy more equitable and accessible and advocating for a more inclusive scientific community. She has also served as a graduate student mentor to participants of the SULI program at Brookhaven Lab and the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at SBU.
Acknowledgments
The Chemistry Division and BWIS thank the Fowler Award Review Committee members for their time and dedication in selecting this year’s award recipients. The committee members, all from Brookhaven Lab, are Angela Kim (NASA Space Radiation Laboratory), Aleida Perez (Office of Educational Programs), Elspeth McSweeney (Energy & Photon Sciences), Esther Tsai (Center for Functional Nanomaterials), Ira Waluyo (NSLS-II), Jantana Blanford (Biology Department), Ping Liu (Chemistry Division), and Rebecca Trojanowski (Interdisciplinary Science Department).
BWIS is a nonprofit organization that supports and encourages the advancement of women in science and is open to all individuals. The organization is funded by Brookhaven Science Associates.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
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2024-22067 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
