Colorado College Assistant Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Amy Dounay ’96, who came to CC as a student on a Boettcher Scholarship and graduated with a B.A. in chemistry, has been awarded a $225,000 Boettcher Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Award. She is one of only seven scientists in the state to receive the award this year.

The three-year grant will support Dounay’s research on the design, synthesis, and evaluation of new drugs for African sleeping sickness. The funding supplements her recent $35,000 grant from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement to support the same research.

African sleeping sickness, also known as Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), threatens the lives of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans annually. HAT is fatal if left untreated, causing convulsions and serious sleep disturbance that advance to coma and death. The disease is caused by parasites, which are transmitted to humans by the bite of a tsetse fly. Rising global temperatures are expected to increase the range of the tsetse fly in coming decades, leading to new and far-reaching outbreaks of HAT.