Walter S. Bloor Award
This award is named in honor of Dr. Walter Bloor, the first chairman of the Department of Biochemistry (1922-1947), who gained international recognition for his pioneering work on methods for the extraction and analysis of lipids from biological tissues. The award was established by a bequest from the Bloor estate and is presented each year to a student in the Biochemistry Program who submits the most outstanding thesis based on his/her Ph.D. research activity.
Walter Bloor received his Ph.D. in 1911 working with the famous Otto Folin at Harvard University, in the field of fatty acids. He spent four years at Washington University in St. Louis, then returned to Harvard University, before accepting a position as a Professor in Biochemistry at the University of California, Berkley in 1918. In 1922 he moved to the University of Rochester where he became a Professor in Biochemistry and Associate Dean of the new School of Medicine and Dentistry. A chemist, Bloor is well known for his work on the fatty acids of plasma, lipid metabolism, and the development of micro methods for lipid analysis, which opened up the field to quantitative studies. Bloor’s graduate student, Warren Sperry, received a Ph.D. in the field of lipid metabolism in 1925; this was the first Ph.D. given by the University of Rochester. Together they completed important work in cholesterol metabolism. Bloor and Robert Sinclair did some of the earliest work in phospholipid metabolism, using the newly available isotope deuterium. Bloor served as President of the American Society of Biological Chemists from 1929 to 1931, a progenitor to the ASBMB, and was Chair of the Executive Committee for FASEB in 1931.
Award Recipients
- 1990 - Alicia Dombrosky
- 1991 - Cheng-Ming Chiang
- 1992 - Gregg Siegal
- 1993 - Brian O’Connell
- 1994 - John Backus
- 1995 - Gloria Culver
- 1996 - Lorna Rodriguez
- 1997 - Mark Driscoll
- 1998 - Yi Yang
- 1999 - Sherry Spinelli
- 2000 - Ganesan Sathya
- 2001 - Negin Martin
- 2002 - Samson Tom
- 2003 - Tamara Ranalli
- 2004 - Hui-I Kao
- 2005 - Xiaoju Ma
- 2006 - Weifeng Gu
- 2007 - Chunxing Yang
- 2008 - Irina Chernyakov
- 2009 - Jason Stewart
- 2010 - Sean Rigby
- 2011 - Keith Connolly
- 2011 - Christopher Hine
- 2012 - Joseph Whipple
- 2013 - Wen Shen
- 2014 - Jeffrey Zuber
- 2015 - Josh Dewe
- 2016 - Stefanie DeVito
- 2018 - Christina Brule and Lu Han
- 2019 - Matthew Payea
- 2020 - Christopher Goodwin, Jiyu Wang
- 2021 - Thareendra De Zoysa, Fanfan Hao
- 2022 - Chen Bao
- 2023 - Arica VanderWal and Ethan Walker
- 2024 - Jesscia Ciesla