Walder Foundation funds Bailey Lab research and communications

The Bailey Lab has received support from the Walder Foundation’s Scientific Innovation pillar, with gifts to support both research and communications activities.

The research gift will provide $1 million over five years and will support the Bailey lab’s structural studies of CRISPR biology and facilitate access to new equipment at the new Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Beckman Center for Cryo-EM.

In addition, the foundation also supports communications and education activities for the lab and the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department. The first major outcome of the communications gift is the creation and launch of this Bailey Lab website, to showcase the lab’s research work. The second major outcome will be the creation of educational materials about CRISPR Type I and III systems, which will be launched from this site later this year.

Though CRISPR systems are relatively well-publicized for a molecular biology topic, much of the available educational information is focused on the Type II CRISPR-Cas9 system and the use of CRISPR for gene editing. The Bailey Lab’s education project’s goal is to provide clear information about the Type I and Type III systems the lab research has focused on.

The Walder Foundation is a private family foundation based in Chicago, has connections to both Johns Hopkins and molecular biology.

 Elizabeth Walder, who heads the foundation, is a Johns Hopkins University alumna with a background in the humanities who became a lawyer with a focus on immigration law. Her husband and foundation co-founder Joseph Walder was a professor of biochemistry at the University of Iowa. His work on nucleic acid antisense resulted in multiple patents, and he founded Integrated DNA Technologies in 1987. Elizabeth Walder was IDT’s Chief Sustainability Officer from 2013 until the company was sold in 2018.

Science Innovation is one of the Walder Foundation’s five pillars, and the Foundation has identified effective communication as one of the challenges facing the scientific community. With the Walder Foundation communications gift, the Bailey Lab will translate the research being done in our lab and elsewhere to engage and educate other researchers, students and the public.