Yousong Ding, Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry, has received a Department of Defense Discovery Award to study a hormone that has shown promise in fighting obesity. The $151,000 grant will support a new study that aims to engineer the hormone to better capture its anti-obesity benefits. Experiments are proposed to identify a cellular target that directly interacts with the hormone and transduces its stimulus to induce beneficial cellular responses. Identification of this cellular target will allow discovery and development of small molecules and biological molecules to directly mimic and enhance the hormone’s benefits to obesity.