Chemistry professor receives Ken Standing Award
[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/brennan1.jpg” caption=”Dr. John Brennan, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, is the first recipient of the Ken Standing Award. File photo.”]Dr. John Brennan, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been named the inaugural winner of the Ken Standing Award, which is presented to a young scientist who has made a significant contribution to the development of technology related to life sciences. Brennan will receive the award at the 3rd International Symposium on Enabling Technologies for Proteomics (ETP 2007) at the MaRS Centre in Toronto on May 10.
“I feel honored at having been selected the inaugural winner of this award,” said Brennan, who graduated from the University of Toronto and began working at McMaster in 1998. “One of the things I enjoy about McMaster is the opportunity to participate in many different collaborative projects, which allows me to do interdisciplinary research that spans chemistry and biochemistry. In fact, the Standing Award was given for work that was done in collaboration with professors Michael Brook in the Department of Chemistry and Yingfu Li in the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences.”
Brennan's teaching is also at the interface of Physical Science and Life Sciences. He is currently teaching a new graduate course in Chemical Biology (CHBY 700) and recently finished teaching a graduate module in Biosensors and Bioanalytical Chemistry. He will focus on research this summer.
The ETP Symposium described Brennan as a world leader in the area of protein immobilization within porous sol/gel-derived silica materials.
“The tricks we discovered were how to make our glass-forming materials compatible with proteins, and also how to control the porosity of the final solid material so that large proteins are retained while small molecules can move in and out of the material and interact with the entrapped protein,” Brennan explained. “By being able to entrap proteins into our sol-gel derived materials, we have been able to form columns, print microscopic arrays of proteins, and develop protein-based coatings for biosensors.”
The Ken Standing Award was established to honour the lifetime achievements of Dr. Kenneth G. Standing, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Manitoba.
His honours include the Canadian Society for Mass Spectrometry Award for Distinguished Contributions to Mass Spectrometry in 1998, the Canadian Association of Physicists Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Industrial & Applied Physics in 2003 and the American Chemical Society's Field and Franklin Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry in 2004.
