Whitehead’s Jing-Ke Weng receives 2016 Beckman Young Investigator Award

Whitehead Member Jing-Ke Weng is one of eight early-career scientists nationwide to be named a 2016 Beckman Young Investigator.

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation established its prestigious Young Investigator Award in 1991 to provide “research support to the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.”

Weng and his lab are slated to receive as much as $750,000 over the next four years in support of research on firefly and coelenterate luciferin biosynthesis, which enables these organisms to produce their characteristic glowing luminescence.

Weng joined the Whitehead Institute faculty in the fall of 2013, having conducted postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute. He earned his PhD in biochemistry from Purdue University and earned a BS in biotechnology from Zhejiang University. In 2014 he was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, and in 2015 he was named a Searle Scholar.