She received the Alberta Gotthardt and Henry Strage Award for Aspiring Young Science Faculty in 2008. She also received the prestigious Pew Scholar grant in the biomedical sciences and an NIH R01 grant in 2007 to support her research on the molecular interactions that drive the beating of cilia and flagella. Her field of research is structural biology and cell biology using state of the art imaging techniques. (nicastro@brandeis.edu)