Ando receives award for work in crystallography

Nozomi Ando, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has received the 2020 Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award from the American Crystallographic Association. The purpose of this award is “to recognize outstanding achievement and exceptional potential in crystallographic research demonstrated by a scientist at an early stage of their independent career.” 

Ando will present a lecture at the next American Crystallographic Association Annual Meeting, held in San Diego in July, where she will receive the award. 

“I am grateful to the ACA and my colleagues for this recognition and to my mentors who paved a path before me,” Ando said. “I am especially grateful to my own mentees for believing in my vision and bringing their talent, creativity and dedication. My career would not exist without them.” 

The Early Career Award includes a $1,000 grant, which Ando will use to continue her research at the intersection of x-ray physics and enzymology. The Ando lab works at this intersection specifically in relation to complex protein systems by developing new techniques based on x-ray scattering. he lab is one of few in the world that is working to disprove the idea that crystallography cannot track movements of protein within crystals. The lab is particularly interested in answering questions centered on proteins in motion. 

Since Ando’s lab departs from conventional crystallography, due to their work on X-ray scattering, “for our scattering work to be recognized by a crystallography community, which has a long and impressive history, is therefore extremely meaningful,” she said.

Ando earned her undergraduate degree  in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001 and her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 2008. She went on to become an assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton University where the Ando lab was formed, and returned to Cornell in 2018.