(AUSTIN) – Livia Schiavinato Eberlin Ph.D., an assistant professor of chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, has won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, sometimes called a “Genius” award with a no-strings attached prize of $625,000. The fellowship results from her invention of the “MasSpec Pen,” a handheld device that identifies cancerous tissue within 10 seconds during surgical procedures. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas provides the funding to determine if her innovation has practical application. Earlier this year, her work on the device earned an Innovation Award from South by Southwest Interactive, and she consulted on an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” that featured the “MasSpec Pen.”
“On behalf of CPRIT, we would like to congratulate Dr. Eberlin on this award and her contributions to the field of cancer research,” said CPRIT Chief Scientific Officer Dr. James Willson. “This ‘Genius’ recognition joins the list of awards from CPRIT that continue to support her promising research.”
Since Dr. Eberlin joined the faculty at UT Austin in 2016 from Stanford with the support of an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, she has received three separate CPRIT grants totaling over $2.2 million. She has been successful in obtaining a CPRIT High Impact/High Risk award, a CPRIT Bridging the Gap: Early Translational Research Award, and one of the inaugural CPRIT Individual Investigator Research Awards for Clinical Translation. To learn more about Dr. Eberlin, please visit: https://eberlin.cm.utexas.edu and https://www.masspecpen.com.
The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. To learn more, please visit: https://www.macfound.org/programs/fellows.
About the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas
To date, CPRIT has awarded $2.15 billion in grants to Texas researchers, institutions and organizations. CPRIT provides funding through its academic research, prevention, and product development research programs. Programs made possible with CPRIT funding have reached Texans from all 254 counties of the state, brought 159 distinguished researchers to Texas, advanced scientific and clinical knowledge, and provided more than 4.7 million life-saving education, training, prevention and early detection services to Texans. Learn more at http://cprit.texas.gov. Follow CPRIT at twitter.com/CPRITTexas and facebook.com/CPRITTexas.