Deloitte QB3 Award for Innovation
The Deloitte QB3 Award for Innovation is a $10,000 prize given to the student, postdoc, or staff scientist (or team) whose research has been deemed to have the greatest capacity to advance human health.
Twenty-nine nominations for the 2012 award were made by faculty at the three QB3 campuses (UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UCSF). The field was narrowed to five finalists by an expert panel of judges representing industry, venture capital, academia and the media.
The UC community chose the winner during a voting phase October 1-12, 2012. Voting took place on the QB3 Facebook page. At a ceremony at UCSF Mission Bay on October 18, QB3 director Reg Kelly revealed the winner: the duo of Aijun Wang and Zhenyu Tang of UC Berkeley. (Wang is now an assistant professor at UC Davis, but the work for which he and Tang won the award was conducted while he was a postdoc in Song Li’s lab at Berkeley.) Read the story in the Daily Californian
The 2012 finalists
| Team member(s) | University | Nominating faculty member | Research topic |
| Michael Bassik & Martin Kampmann | UCSF | Jonathan Weissman | Systematic elucidation of genetic interactions in human cells |
| Michelle Maalouf | UC Santa Cruz | Nader Pourmand | Creating artificial stem cells on the single cell level |
| Anjan Debnath | UCSF | James McKerrow | An innovative screen identifies a new drug lead for global diarrheal parasite |
| Jesse McFarland, Iana Serafimova, Ville Paavilainen, Rand Miller & Shyam Krishnan | UCSF | Jack Taunton | A paradigm-shifting chemical technology for the design of selective drugs |
| Aijun Wang & Zhenyu Tang | UC Berkeley | Song Li | Stem cells: the real culprit behind hardened arteries |