Two Women Scholars Among the Five Inaugural Moore Inventor Fellows

Gordon Moore is the founder and former CEO of Intel Corporation. In 2000, he and his wife established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California, with an endowment of $5 billion.

Now the foundation has announced the inaugural class of five Moore Inventor Fellows. Each Moore Inventor Fellow will receive $825,000 over the next three years to support their research. Robert Kirshner, chief program officer for science at the Moore Foundation, stated that “we cannot know in advance that an invention we support will change the world – but giving passionate inventors the resources to develop a good idea can accelerate progress in the areas we care about.”

Two of the five inaugural Moore Inventor Fellows are women.

Mona Jarrahi is an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is working on an imaging tool to help researchers understand how biological molecules behave in their natural environment. Dr. Jarrahi joined the faculty at UCLA in 2013 after teaching at the University of Michigan. She is a graduate of the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. Dr. Jarrahi holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Joanna Slusky is an assistant professor of molecular biosciences and computational biology at the University of Kansas. She has invented a protein that she hopes will re-sensitize bacteria to common antibiotics and thus overcome diseases that have developed a resistance to particular antibiotic drugs. Dr. Slusky joined the faculty at the University of Kansas in 2014. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Stockholm in Sweden and the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Pennsylvania.