The Hearst Foundations recently awarded Sanford-Burnham with a grant to advance research in the Institute’s Center for Nanomedicine (CNM), led by Director Jamey Marth, Ph.D.

The CNM is a partnership between Sanford-Burnham and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) that combines world-class expertise in biology, engineering, materials science, chemistry, physics, and computational modeling to address fundamental biomedical problems. The Center seeks to discover effective diagnostics and treatments, and ultimately cures, for human diseases including cancer, diabetes, and various degenerative diseases.

Marth, a faculty member at both Sanford-Burnham and UCSB, will use the Hearst Foundations grant to advance his research and share it with the public. In his research, Marth uses the AlloSphere, a unique three-story, immersive sphere and one of the world’s largest instruments for scientific data simulation and visualization, housed on the UCSB campus.

His goal is to develop a user-guided reconstruction of the human body that enables real-time analysis of cancer development, tumor formation, metastatic activity, and therapeutic treatment by nanomedicine. Students, teachers, and the general public will be invited into the AlloSphere to explore these 3D images. Marth calls this undertaking, “a novel educational and outreach tool to inspire the next generation of students to enter careers in science and engineering.”

The Hearst Foundations are national philanthropic resources for organizations and institutions working in the fields of education, health, culture, and social service. The charitable goals of the Foundations reflect the philanthropic interests of William Randolph Hearst.

Sanford-Burnham is grateful to all of the organizations and individuals who support the Institute’s research.