Research Corporation, the only U.S. philanthropic foundation wholly dedicated to the advancement of science and technology, has just awarded Dr. Patricia Bossart-Whitaker, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Winthrop University, a two year Cottrell College Research Award for initiating the three-dimensional molecular structure determination of a biomedically important protein using novel X-ray diffraction techniques. Undergraduate chemistry and biology students are intimately involved in all aspects of the project. Outside collaborators include researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and Yale University Medical School.

Research Corporation  was established in 1912 by Frederick Gardner Cottrell, a young university professor turned philanthropist who endowed it with patent rights to his valuable invention: the electrostatic precipitator for controlling industrial air pollution. Research Corporation supports research in physics, chemistry, and astronomy at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities.

The foundation makes between 200 and 300 awards annually totaling $5 to $7 million under a number of programs that encourage beginning faculty members, original ideas, and the involvement of students in scientific investigations. The foundation's programs have aided early inquiries by roughly 15,000 scientists, 27 of whom have won Nobel Prizes. Hundreds of other grantees have received the awards of the American Chemical or Physical Societies, and are members of such bodies as the National Academy of Sciences.

For this year's Cottrell College Science program, there were over 175 proposals submitted and approximately 50 awards are being made.  Dr. Bossart-Whitaker's research was one of the few awards given to a "first-time" submission.

Cottrell Research grants are extremely competitive awards given to faculty at some of the finest non-Ph.D. granting Universities in the U.S. and Canada.  Among last year's recipients were faculty from Amherst College, Barnard College, Bucknell University, Carleton College, College of the Holy Cross, College of William and Mary, Davidson College, Fordham University, Furman University, Haverford College, Hope College, James Madison University, John Carroll University, Mount Holyoke College, Occidental College, Otterbein College, Smith College, Stetson University, United States Air Force Academy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Winnipeg, Whitman College, Williams College, and Xavier University.