UW Molecular Biologist Wins Prestigious National Institutes of Health Grant

Owen Funk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wyoming in the Department of Molecular Biology, recently was awarded a highly competitive National Institutes of Health (NIH) “Pathway to Independence” grant.

The five-year grant from the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) began in March.

Funk is the first person at UW to receive a NIH Pathway to Independence grant, which is designed to help promising postdoctoral scientists become tenure-track faculty members by supporting career development and independent scientific research.

Funk was one of the first six recipients selected by NIGMS in 2026, with fellow awardees representing Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Princeton University, the Salk Institute and Yale University.

“To me, this confirms something many of us at UW have known for a long time -- that Wyoming is a great place for training talented research scientists at all career stages,” says David Fay, a professor of molecular biology and one of Funk’s mentors. “Owen came to the lab with all the right knowledge and skills, so this has turned out to be a really fun collaboration and a very unique and exciting area for future studies.”

For his research, Funk is studying the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans to understand cells with multiple nuclei.

Most animal cells have only one nucleus, which is the control center of the cell and contains most of the cell’s genetic material. However, sometimes cells fuse together, creating a cell with multiple nuclei.

In humans, cells with multiple nuclei are critical to muscle, bone and placenta formation. In C. elegans, these cells control many epidermal functions, including molting.

“Ultimately, figuring out how these fused cells function and how their internal nuclei communicate in the worm will provide insights into human biology, helping us understand and treat diseases like muscle disorders or aggressive cancers where cell fusion goes wrong,” Funk says.

For the first two years of his Pathway to Independence grant, Funk will pursue his research with mentorship from Fay and Professor Dan Levy.

The second stage of the grant will fund his first three years as a tenure-track faculty member. He hopes to secure a faculty position at UW if possible.

“We recently became an R1 research university, and I think this is a sign that UW and (the Department of Molecular Biology) are doing science at a really high level -- and that you don’t have to go to Harvard or Yale to conduct amazing research,” Funk says.

Funk earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and received his bachelor’s degree from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

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