The Trainee and Young Faculty Diversity Enhancement (TYDE) fellowships, first established for the 2018 SRBR meeting, have been renamed the Emmett Chappelle awards. Like the TYDE fellowships, the Emmett Chappelle awards aim to promote attendance and participation of underrepresented minorities (URM) at the SRBR meeting. Awardees will be provided with professional development tools and networking opportunities to become future leaders and role models in the biological rhythms community.
With this name change, SRBR would like to highlight the seminal contributions of Emmett Chappelle (1925 – 2019) to science, most notably his invention of the use of bioluminescence to visualize biological processes inside cells, using the same molecules that make fireflies glow, while he worked at NASA in the 1960s. This discovery paved the way for numerous applications in the field of chronobiology and is still being used by researchers around the world, for example to visualize circadian rhythms in gene expression in cells in the brain. We hope that the Emmett Chappelle awards will shine a light on the next generation of scientists.
Read more about Emmett Chappelle’s legacy in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
