Hualiang Pi receives NIH Director's New Innovator Award

Hualiang Pi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and a member of the Yale Microbial Sciences Institute, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award for her research investigating the impact of ferrosome organelle biogenesis on host-microbe interactions.

The award is part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program and supports early career investigators of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative research projects with the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important areas relevant to the NIH mission.

Dr. Pi’s work examines Clostridioides difficile, a Gram-positive, spore-forming anaerobic bacterium and leading cause of nosocomial and antibiotic-associated intestinal infections in the United States. Recent work in the Pi Lab reveals that C. difficile undergoes an intracellular iron biomineralization process and produces membrane-bound ferrosome organelles containing iron phosphate biominerals. These ferrosomes serve as an iron storage mechanism, protecting cells against iron intoxication upon transient iron overload. With the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Dr. Pi will examine the molecular basis of ferrosome biogenesis and the implications of ferrosome formation for C. difficile infection.