Dr. Eva Chin, assistant professor of kinesiology in the University of Maryland School of Public Health, was awarded a TEDCO Maryland Innovation Initiative Award to support research focused on the development of a clinical assay for the early diagnosis of ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and for monitoring treatment. With Dr. Justin Kwan, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and investigators at Johns Hopkins University (Drs. Lyle Ostrow and Jeffrey Rothstein), she will determine which proteins are relevant to patients with ALS and develop a test which uses a muscle biopsy sample that is analyzed for the specific proteins that are defective in ALS.