Jerelle Joseph. Photo by David Kelly Crow
Jerelle Joseph, an expert in computational biophysics and bioengineering, has won a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, supporting her efforts to understand key molecular structures within living cells.
Joseph, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, develops computational models to study the rules governing cells’ molecular compartments. Joseph focuses on compartments that lack the kind of organizing membrane that defines the nucleus — membraneless structures called biomolecular condensates. Over the past decade researchers have discovered that many biomolecular condensates are liquid-like compartments, which separate from their surroundings like oil droplets in water and are responsible for many of life’s most important functions. Joseph’s work not only seeks to understand and characterize these condensates but also to turn that understanding into practical approaches for improving health and treating disease.
The award, which includes more than $2 million in research funding, comes for her work on modeling these systems and will support her further investigation into the interplay between RNA and proteins that forms a key class of condensates called stress granules. The work will also “facilitate therapeutic design to target condensate-related diseases,” according to Joseph. Dysfunction in stress granules has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS and dementia, as well as many infectious diseases and cancers. Joseph hopes to map stress granules’ material properties to the molecular structures that form within them; uncover the role of mRNA in regulating those properties; and leverage that data for computational models that examine the impact of small molecule drugs on stress granules.
Joseph joined Princeton in 2023 after nearly three years as a junior research fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She also earned her Ph.D. at Cambridge, where she studied computational chemistry. Since arriving at Princeton she has received an Exploratory Cell Networks grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, an Innovation Research Grant from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a Young Investigator’s Award from the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics, among other honors. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of the West Indies.