Robinson Professor of Chemistry David Walt will receive the Gustavus John Esselen Award from the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society during an April 10 ceremony in Cambridge, Mass.
The award recognizes a chemist who has done significant work to benefit the public interest, according to Karen Piper, secretary to the Esselen Committee.
[Walt] is being honored for his work in developing microarrays and single molecule detection for understanding and treatment of disease," Piper told the Daily in an email. "His work is especially useful in early diagnosis, for example, in malignancies."
According to Walt, his research focuses on technology at the molecular level.
"We develop techniques that work at the micro- and nano-scale ... these are devices that have technologies that we've created that have dimensions kind of smaller than an antenna on an ant," he said. "We develop technologies that are able to do molecular balances of everything from genes to proteins at a very tiny level that involves extremely small measurements of low concentration things that are in blood or any kind of environmental sample."
This research has been widely used, Walt explained.
"The technology that came out of my lab has turned out to have a tremendous amount of impact in a wide variety of fields for both the clinical market and the agriculture market, but has also enabled a tremendous amount of new research discovery," he said. "[It] is particularly gratifying that the technology that they developed at Tufts has enabled many new discoveries in thousands of research labs across the world."
One such research lab was the J. Craig Venter Institute, according to Krishna Kumar, chair of the Tufts Department of Chemistry.
"When Craig Venter was here he mentioned David Walt ... multiple times," Kumar said. "The reason for that was even the Craig Venter Institute is using instruments from Illumina ... This has basically touched everyone's life and ... every company in the world that is involved in sequencing or medicine is using this technology."
Walt, who has been at Tufts for 33 years, started numerous companies during his tenure, including Illumina, a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company that develops systems for analyzing genetics and Quanterix.
"The science was developed right on this floor, and what he and his group have developed is essentially a way to sequence [genomes] using fiber optics," Kumar said. "Forbes had a cover article on the fastest growing companies in America. Illumina was number one. [Illumina] just recently announced a $1,000 genome, so this is a big deal."
Kumar emphasized that the Esselen Award is not only for chemists working in the Northeast, but that Walt follows many international winners, including Nobel laureates.
"[The award] is administered by the Northeast Section of the ACS, but it's really an international award," he explained. "They choose people who are not just Americans but [from] across the world. Mario Molina, who is a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry
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