President's Frontier Award

On February 1, 2016, Scott Bailey was in for a surprise when he walked into his lab – instead of a few students hard at work, it was filled with an applauding crowd students, staff and faculty from across the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University, celebrating his selection as the 2016 President’s Frontier Award winner.

Scott received the award in for his work in structural biology, focused on CRISPR systems.

The President’s Frontier Award is given to one faculty member each year, recognizing their achievements and the potential for innovation in their fields – and it provides $250,000 in flexible funding. Scott was the second winner of the award, which was initially funded for five years of awards, but it has recently been renewed to continue through 2024.

The prize funding is intended to give the winners resources to further develop their ideas and support their transformational work. The flexible nature of the funding means they can follow their curiosity in directions that might not be possible with other research funding.

“Government funding is more narrowly defined in what you can do. With this you can go after a problem and really take risks with it. … That is where the breakthroughs tend to come," Scott told the JHU Hub when he received the award.