Scientist wins national new faculty award

Jose A. Gascon, a new assistant professor of chemistry, is the first faculty member at UConn to win a national New Faculty Award from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, New York .

The $50,000, five-year award, one of only 12 in the country, will be used to further his research on the quantum mechanical nature of chemical and physical phenomena that occur in proteins and enzymes at the molecular level.

Gascon, a physical chemist, joined UConn this fall from Yale University , where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He characterizes his work as biochemistry with a theoretical or computation spin. He works at the interfaces of chemistry, physics, and biology.

"The interfaces are diffuse. Sometimes what I do could be considered biophysics," he adds.

He is interested in the protein rhodopsin, present in the retina of the eye, which traps light and contributes to vision.

Gascon also is interested in the study of enzymes that contain vanadium, a chemical element abundant in marine life. Vanadium-containing complexes have shown potential for use in diabetes therapy.

His main research tool is using a hybrid method that combines quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics, or QM/MM, to compute and describe the interactions of atoms in the protein. In collaboration with others he has come up with a new method, called Moving Domain QM/MM. It takes into account polarization phenomena, which means that the molecular charges within the protein are able to change according to their environment.

The computations involved in his research are complex, and Gascon has time grants to work at two major super-computing centers, in Pittsburgh and California .

Gascon's work has many applications, from improving the understanding of the chemical reactions going on inside the protein, to drug design, such as designing a molecule to interact with and inhibit the enzyme of a disease-causing protein.

He was nominated for the Dreyfus award by his new department head, Steven L. Suib, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Chemistry.

"Dr. Gascon has an impressive research record and deserves the recognition of this prestigious award," said Suib. "Such awards are rare and we are truly fortunate to have Dr. Gascon join our faculty."

Gascon, 34, a native of Villa Maria in the Cordoba province in central Argentina , started out majoring in physics as an undergraduate in Argentina . He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Louisiana State University and then became interested in applying physical chemistry to biological problems, which he began working on at Yale.