We are thrilled to announce that Nichole Broderick, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology, has been named a 2024 Catalyst Awardee by Johns Hopkins University. This prestigious award recognizes early career faculty members who demonstrate exceptional promise in their respective fields.
The Catalyst Awards program, established in June 2024, honors thirty-five faculty members each year, providing them with a $75,000 grant, mentoring opportunities, and institutional recognition. These awards are designed to support innovative research and creative endeavors, setting recipients on a path to a sustainable and rewarding academic career. The program fosters a community of scholars by offering funding, mentorship, and the chance to join a cohort of peers at similar stages in their careers.
This year’s awardees are engaged in a wide array of groundbreaking projects. These include creating frameworks for responsible interpretation of Large Language Models (LLM), exploring alternative histories of the early alphabet in the ancient Near East, and documenting the evolving structures of farming populations and their implications for global food security. The competitive selection process highlights the remarkable potential of these early career researchers to make significant contributions to their fields.
Nichole Broderick has an impressive background in the study of microbiology and entomology. Before joining Johns Hopkins University, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Institute for Systems Genomics at the University of Connecticut. From 2013 to 2015, she served as an Associate Research Scientist at Yale University’s Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology. Nichole earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied under Ken Raffa (Entomology) and Jo Handelsman (Microbiology). She conducted her postdoctoral research in the lab of Bruno Lemaitre at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Nichole’s research focuses on the characterization of the gut microbiota of insect hosts and the study of their impacts on host physiology and susceptibility to disease. Her Catalyst Award-winning project is titled “Sensing the dark – defining connections between olfaction and melanin immunity in flies.”
Please join us in congratulating Nichole Broderick on this outstanding achievement. Her dedication and innovative research continue to make significant impacts in the field of biology, and we look forward to her future contributions and successes.