Congratulations, Adam Hoppe, research rock star!

Here is an article in the City of Brookings, South Dakota e-newsletter about Adam Hoppe, Loren's nephew. He has been awarded a very prestigious National Science Foundation grant. I'm posting the whole article because it is very exciting, and everyone is extremely proud and happy for him!

"Farm boy" invents high-tech tools
Posted: Friday, Feb 4th, 2011


South Dakota State University assistant professor Adam Hoppe has won a National Science Foundation career award to help him continue his work building a high-tech microscope to offer unprecedented resolution for observing the biochemical machinery at work in living cells.


SDSU scientist-researcher at work on new type of microscope

A young man who grew up tinkering on backyard inventions with his father and grandfather has moved on to bigger challenges.

Minnesota farm boy Adam Hoppe is now at work in Brookings, building a better microscope for studying proteins in living cells.

A major grant from the National Science Foundation is funding the South Dakota State University researcher's work building a high-tech microscope that will allow scientists to make movies of unprecedented resolution to show the biochemical machinery at work inside living cells.

Now an assistant professor Adam in South Dakota State's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Hoppe has won an NSF CAREER award, awarded to new or young investigators through a competitive application process.

Researchers are allowed three attempts to get one of these grants. Hoppe, who grew up on a farm near Crookston, Minn., landed it on his first try for his ongoing efforts to develop new instrumentation to study protein-to-protein interactions inside the living cell.

Hoppe's $785,000 grant not only does cutting-edge science, it also grooms the next generation of scientists. In addition to building the new instrument according to his own design -- actually refining and enlarging the instrument he's already designed -- Hoppe will carry out a three-part educational plan. That includes training graduate students and also bringing high school teachers in to get real-life laboratory experience that can help them to the classroom. The third part of that educational component is to use the Internet to disseminate information about the research and explain to a lay audience why it's important.

Here is a longer article that explains more about the biochemistry that Adam's work will help us understand, and about how the microscope actually works.
An excerpt helps us understand the key insight that made this work possible:

Professor Joel Swanson, who supervised Hoppe’s Ph.D. work at the University of Michigan and later kept him on as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a faculty researcher, said Hoppe made a key contribution by realizing that scientists were discarding a potential source of information.

“He is an extraordinary scientist. The methods he invented when he was in Michigan transformed our research program. Prior to his work, labs could see where protein-protein interactions were happening inside cells, but they could not measure the magnitudes of those interactions,” Swanson said. “Adam's chief initial insight was that the fluorescence others were removing as background noise contained information about the number of interacting molecules inside the cell. With that realization, he devised mathematical processing methods for calibrating microscopes and quantifying the chemistries inside the cells.”