By Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications

José Avalos has been named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar “for spatial and dynamic control of engineered metabolism for microbial chemical production.”

The award is given to chemical scientists and engineers in the first five years of their academic careers who have an outstanding independent body of scholarship and a deep commitment to education. Each of this year’s 13 award recipients will receive an unrestricted research grant of $100,000.

Avalos, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, joined the Princeton faculty in 2015. He also holds appointments in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

His work focuses engineering microbes with desirable traits to address challenging problems in sustainable energy, human health, sustainable manufacturing and the environment. His lab takes a two-pronged approach to research, both engineering cells using new technologies developed in the lab while also addressing fundamental questions of protein structure and function, cellular physiology, and metabolism. The two facets of the lab complement and fuel each other, as technological developments give rise to new fundamental questions, and basic research opens avenues for new technologies.

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, devoted to the advancement of the chemical sciences, was established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus in honor of his brother Henry. Since its inception in 1970, the teacher-scholar program has awarded almost $50 million to support emerging young leaders in the chemical sciences.