Sprowl receives $750,000 NSF CAREER Award

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program recognizes rising faculty who are academic role models in research and education and who lead advances in the mission of their institution. The award provides funding to build a strong foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

“This is a prestigious award that I am greatly honored to receive,” says Sprowl.

A UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SPPS) faculty member since 2018, Sprowl’s research program primarily conducts translational studies that aim to identify and characterize regulators of drug disposition which contributes to the variability of drug toxicity or efficacy in cancer patients. His research currently focuses on the role of transporter proteins in regulating drug or nutrient uptake and accumulation.

The five-year CAREER award, worth nearly $750,000, will support Sprowl’s work to identify a novel post-translational event that regulates variability in sodium-glucose-linked transporter (SGLT) activity and glucose absorption.

“The award recognizes our efforts to improve understanding of transport proteins that can contribute to interindividual differences, particularly those involving how glucose is absorbed into the body, and provides funds to support such investigation,” explains Sprowl.

SGLTs are proteins that are necessary for cellular uptake of glucose, which is an essential nutrient. Altered activity of these proteins can lead to poor glucose absorption and nutrient deficiency. Unfortunately, cellular events that regulate SGLT activity are poorly understood. This is particularly true for tyrosine phosphorylation, a form of modification that can change protein structure and function, that has not yet been studied in relation to SGLT activity.

Sprowl’s long-term goal of this NSF CAREER research project is to improve the understanding of how SGLT tyrosine phosphorylation, or tyrosine kinase proteins that activate this form of modification, regulate changes in glucose movement into cells.

The project also includes several strategies for educational improvements that include highlighting the biological importance of SGLTs, as well as the training and recruitment of junior scientists who will lead future science, technology, engineering and mathematic efforts.

“This award provides support in the training of a PhD student,” says Sprowl. “Moreover, the educational support enables us to train educators and young underprivileged students so that they are prepared to share scientific knowledge or become more familiar with research before post-secondary education begins.”  

Collectively, this research project is expected to impact many scientific disciplines, including molecular, cellular, and systems biology, through educational insight and novel scientific discoveries involving glucose transporters.

Sprowl was previously honored with the Division for Translational and Clinical Pharmacology Early Career Award from The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) in 2023 and received a New Investigator Award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) in 2019.

Prior to joining the faculty at UB SPPS, Sprowl was an assistant professor at D’Youville College, School of Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical, Social and Administrative Sciences from 2014-2018. He earned his PhD in biomolecular sciences from Laurentian University in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmaceutical sciences at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2014.