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Disney wins Dreyfus Foundation award
Matthew Disney has been recognized for his leadership in the classroom and in the lab with a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
Matthew Disney, assistant professor of chemistry, was one of 14 scientists awarded a $75,000 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation for his leadership in the lab and in the classroom.
The Dreyfus Foundation supports chemistry-related scientific research in the United States. Each year, its Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program provides unrestricted grants to support the teaching and research of young, full-time, tenure-track faculty in the chemical sciences, including biochemistry, materials chemistry and chemical engineering. Nominating institutions may submit only one faculty member each year, and nominees must collect a body of scholarship as independent researchers and demonstrate a commitment to undergraduate education.
Disney studies how small molecules target ribonucleic acid (RNA) in order to better understand RNA’s role in causing disease. He is in the process of building a database of RNA structures that make the best targets for drugs used to treat such inherited diseases as breast cancer, sickle cell anemia and muscular dystrophy. Disney and his research group already have discovered a drug that has been shown to be effective against two common but previously incurable types of myotonic muscular dystrophy. His lab also creates, studies and tests new antibiotics that withstand bacterial resistance, and the scientists are taking that research into Buffalo classrooms to help teachers develop a curriculum on antibiotic resistance for high school students.
Disney has had an impressive track record of early-career accomplishments and recognition. In 2008, he received the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and in 2006 received the James D. Watson Investigator Award from the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation.
Disney earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Maryland-College Park and a master’s degree in chemistry and a PhD in biophysical chemistry, both from the University of Rochester. He has completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Roche Foundation.
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