The Biology Department at our university is proud to announce that Dr. Rajiv McCoy, Assistant Professor, has been named a 2024 Catalyst Award recipient. This prestigious award, presented by Johns Hopkins University, recognizes thirty-five early career faculty members who demonstrate exceptional promise in their respective fields.

The Catalyst Award is designed to support the research and creative endeavors of these emerging scholars with a $75,000 grant, mentoring opportunities, and institutional recognition. Awardees are selected based on the innovative and impactful nature of their projects, with this year’s recipients exploring diverse and groundbreaking topics. These include creating frameworks for the responsible interpretation of Large Language Models (LLM), examining alternative histories of the early alphabet in the ancient Near East, and studying the evolving structures of farming populations and their implications for global food security.

Dr. McCoy’s award-winning research project is titled “Genomic sources of variability in human embryonic aneuploidy.” His research focuses on human genetics and evolution, utilizing computational and statistical genomic approaches to better understand human evolution and reproduction. He earned his PhD from Stanford University and completed his postdoctoral work at Princeton University and the University of Washington. His contributions to the field of biology are well-recognized, and this award further underscores the significance of his work.

The Catalyst Award program aims to set early career faculty on a trajectory toward sustainable and rewarding academic careers by providing crucial funding, fostering mentoring relationships, and facilitating connections among peers at similar career stages. The funds are competitively allocated in response to an annual university-wide request for applications, ensuring that only the most promising projects receive support.

We congratulate Dr. Rajiv McCoy on this remarkable achievement and look forward to the advancements his research will bring to the field of human genetics and beyond.