Greg Payne Receives Provost's Excellence Award for Professional Track Faculty

Greg Payne, a Fischell Institute Fellow and Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) research professor, has been awarded the Provost’s Excellence Award for Professional Track Faculty in recognition of consistently excellent contributions in research. 

Award recipients receive a letter of recognition from the provost and $1,000. 

“Greg is a world-renowned authority in biomaterials,” said Fischell Institute Director William Bentley. “His focus has been on stimuli-responsive materials found in nature, including gelatin, melanin, agarose, and chitosan, among others. He has published more than 270 refereed papers in journals, nearly ten per year, in publications such as Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Advanced Functional Materials. His papers have been cited over 16,000 times.”

Fischell Fellow Srinivasa Raghavan, professor in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering, calls Payne a visionary, one who has launched entirely new areas of research through his work.

“He is the quintessential scientist who thrives at the interface between disciplines,” said Raghavan. “Together with Dr. Bentley and co-workers, he has incorporated elements of at least three scientific areas into his research: polymer science, biochemical engineering, and electrochemistry. Through his research, Dr. Payne has taught the world the concepts of biofabrication and electro-bio-fabrication. He showed how these new modes of manufacturing could be accomplished using the biopolymer chitosan. By applying electrical signals, chitosan could be deposited as a gel on gold electrodes. Proteins or nanocontainers could then be anchored onto the gels. The resulting materials could serve as biosensors, e.g., for measuring oxidative stress, which is a key marker of diseases. Moreover, the gels can be used for redox-based bio-electronics, where an electrical signal can turn on a gene in bacteria entrapped within the gel.”

Payne’s interest in applying engineering principles to mental health led him to collaborate with Deanna Kelly, acting director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC). Together, they developed a simple methodology to measure oxidative stress from serum samples, which can be used to measure diseases such as schizophrenia.

Payne’s research group found that a person’s level of oxidative stress stays imprinted in serum samples, enabling them to measure frozen samples from clinical studies that MPRC researchers had performed years earlier. 

Payne’s research group observed that persons diagnosed with schizophrenia have higher levels of oxidative stress, and that psychosocial stressors—like those that people encounter in their daily lives—can increase oxidative stress levels. They also found that a gluten-free diet can lower the oxidative stress levels for people who are sensitive to gluten.  

After completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cornell, Payne earned his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1984. 

He then embarked on a successful research career, starting as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and moving to the University of Maryland system in 1986. 

In 2011, Payne and Bentley received a University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Research/Scholarship/Creative Activity that recognized their long-term collaboration interfacing electronics with biology.

“I’ve been fortunate to be associated with both the Fischell Institute and IBBR,” said Payne. “The two institutes have given me the freedom to pursue non-traditional research areas, engage collaborators from around the world, and work with outstanding and enthusiastic young scholars.”