Pharmaceutical Sciences graduate students Bingming Chen and Niyanta Kumar, who, along with Ross Cheloha, graduate student, chemistry, Gellman Group, were among only two winners of this year’s WARF Discovery Challenge Research Award for their collaborative research proposal.

Chen is a member of the laboratory group of Lingjun Li, professor; Kumar is a member of the laboratory of Robert Thorne, assistant professor, both in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Division.

This competition is for young scientists at UW–Madison who aim to carry out cross-disciplinary collaborations with the goal of advancing each party’s research projects. Eligibility for the competition required presenters to work with collaborators outside their own discipline. Teams submitted a brief proposal describing an original research idea. Two proposals were selected to receive as much as $7,500 in grant money to fund work on the project. Winners of the Discovery Challenge Research Award Competition also will have the opportunity to present their work at the 2015 Discovery Challenge Research Symposium.

All three graduate students were honored at the WARF Innovation Awards Ceremony held on October 21, 2014.