HHMI awards recognize Chemistry faculty member and graduate student

Professor Jon Stewart and graduate student Andrew Lampkins were presented with 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards.

Dr. Jon Stewart received the Fall 2006 HHMI Distinguished Mentor Award, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate mentoring. Six awardees were selected in the Fall 2006 competition. These came from 34 nominees and applicants from seven different colleges at UF. Since starting his career at UF in 1994, Dr. Stewart’s research group has included 19 graduate and 22 undergraduate coworkers. Several have subsequently received major awards including a Churchill Scholarship (the first ever awarded at Florida), a Goldwater Scholarship and an NSF Predoctoral Fellowship. Dr. Stewart was recently invited to be one of eleven mentors for the Beckman Scholar program for University of Florida undergraduates.

Graduate student Andrew Lampkins received the 2006 HHMI Science for Life Graduate Student Award. This award recognizes excellence in graduate students who are able to mentor their undergraduates to a point where the undergraduate achieves co-authorship in peer-reviewed publications. Lampkins earned his Pharm.D. in 2002 from Butler University in Indianapolis, IN, and moved to the University of Florida for his Ph.D. studies in organic chemistry under the guidance of Prof. Ronald K. Castellano. Andrew received the award for his work with Osama Abdul-Rahim, who is now pursing his M.D. at Drexel University. The pair published two peer-reviewed research papers together, the first in Organic Letters in 2005, and the second in the Journal of Organic Chemistry in 2006.