The Burroughs Wellcome Fund June 12 announced that Picower Institute postdoctoral fellow Rebecca Pinals is among nine winners of its prestigious 2023 Career Awards at the Scientific Interface.
The highly competitive awards recognize “exceptional researchers whose work exemplifies the collaborative spirit necessary for breakthrough discoveries,” for instance because they are working at the intersection of multiple disciplines, according to BWF’s announcement. Pinals and the other winners will each receive a five-year, $500,000 grant supporting their research.
In her work in the lab of Picower Professor and Picower Institute Director Li-Huei Tsai, Pinals is creating a nanosensor-integrated human “brain-on-a-chip” culture of multiple cell types to enable novel studies of neurodegeneration, with a specific focus on Alzheimer’s disease. Combining tiny sensors into more realistic brain-like tissue modeling Alzheimer’s could improve understanding of how the disease gains its terrible hold on the brain.
