On April 20th 2018, Dr. Phanourios Tamamis, assistant professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, was awarded the 2018 KANEKA Junior Faculty Award for outstanding performance and dedication in his research, recognized by the Polymer Technology Center of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station and the Kaneka Foundation.
Tamamis’ research focuses on computational biophysics and biomolecular engineering, with the aim to address key challenges in amyloid diseases, amyloid biomaterials and the structural elucidation of key biological axes. In his award talk at the Polymer Technology Industrial Consortium meeting, Tamamis presented part of his research, which starts from understanding and inhibiting protein aggregation and the formation of amyloid fibrils that occur in many age-related diseases (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease), and aims to exploit amyloid formation for the discovery of novel biopolymer-based materials with applications in biomedicine, energy and the environment. In this direction, Tamamis’ lab is developing the first computational framework for the design of functional amyloid materials. Such a framework is expected to revolutionize how functional amyloid biopolymer-based materials are designed, and thus lead to novel amyloid materials of the future.
Earlier in 2018, Tamamis was awarded a grant from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, for his research on potential therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Type 2 diabetes.