Prof. Albert Keung has been selected to receive the 2025 ALCOA Foundation Research Achievement Award! This award recognizes young faculty members who have accomplished outstanding research achievements during the preceding three years.

Keung is an “ideas” leader working to solve challenging problems in bioengineering by coupling chemical engineering and bioengineering principles with a broad range of techniques from biochemistry, molecular biology, and computer science. One of the recent accomplishments from Dr. Keung’s laboratory is the development of the first complete and functional DNA-based computer capable of exabyte level organization, which can not only store and retrieve image and text files but can solve sudoku and chess problems. 

In the area of protein engineering, Prof. Keung has developed and used multiple high throughput and functional experimental platforms to investigate eukaryotic proteins with roles spanning from cancer signaling to gene regulation. His lab has shown, for example, that the anti-tumor compound, chaetocin, in addition to its well-known inhibition of methyltransferase activity, also disrupts specific interactions of cysteine-rich proteins through its disulfide moiety. Their work, thus, elegantly brings into question common assumptions concerning the mechanism of chaetocin, with broad implications for the interpretation of experimental studies and its therapeutic use. 

In yet a third area of research, he leads an effort to develop human cerebral organoid models to study aging, addiction, and neurodevelopment disorders. This work demonstrates that exposure to recreational drugs can sensitize specific sets of genes to future exposures and desensitize others, thereby providing a molecular mechanism for the changes associated with addiction. And these are just a few examples of the remarkable breadth, quality, and creativity from Prof. Keung’s laboratory.

In addition to this award, he was also recently named the Director of Biotechnology Programs for NC State’s Integrative Sciences Initiative. Congratulations on these recognitions, Prof. Albert Keung!