Dr. Angela Ho and Christina Gallo (PhD in Pharmacology student and member of the Ho/Beffert lab) recently received grants from the National Institute on Aging the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ho received a R21 grant from NIA/NIH. The project’s goal is to determine the specificity of the cell-permeable APP mimetic peptide to disrupt the APP-Mint interaction and reduce Ab…
Postdoc Joseph Zak of the Murthy Lab has been chosen by leaders of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS) as a recipient of this year’s Polak Young Investigator Award. This award recognizes postdocs and early-career researchers who study organisms’ ability to sense and respond to chemicals in their environment. Zak and the other honorees presented their research at a virtual symposium on April 20 as part of the…
Since 1984, the prestigious Whitehead Fellows Program has enabled extraordinarily talented young scientists to launch independent labs right out of graduate school, instead of joining a senior researcher’s lab. The first Valhalla Foundation Fellow will be Tobiloba Oni, who joined the Institute in February as a Whitehead Fellow. Oni is a cell biologist whose graduate research at Cold Spring Harbor…
Following a year that demonstrated the importance and practical applications of scientific advancement and invention, the Lemelson-MIT Program announced seven winners of its annual 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize on April 26, World Intellectual Property Day. The program awarded a total of $90,000 to four graduate students and three undergraduate teams from across the country. The majority of winners have filed…
The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) has named Xiaowei Zhuang, Ph.D., winner of the 2021 Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences for pioneering the development of super-resolution microscopy and genome-scale imaging showing new spatial and functional organizations of molecules and cells. Dr. Zhuang’s innovative work with microscopy has enabled researchers to visualize with high resolution the positioning of…
One of life’s great mysteries is how a single egg cell can contain all the information needed to create a fully specialized complex organism, including more egg cells. Ruth Lehmann, director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, has done a tremendous amount to solve that mystery. Beginning in her graduate student days, she uncovered a pathway that controls germ cell…
Dr. Edward T. Chouchani of Harvard Medical School is the winner of the 2021 Armen H. Tashjian Jr. Award for Excellence in Endocrine Research. This award was established to recognize scholars early in their careers who are pursuing novel areas of discovery in endocrine and related areas of research. The committee is comprised of Sudha Biddinger, MD, Ph.D.; David E.…
Rebecca Harris, a physician-scientist at Whitehead Institute’s Brit J. d’Arbeloff Center for Women’s Health, has received a prestigious funding award from the NIH’s Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) program. BIRCWH is a mentored career-development program that connects high-achieving early-career researchers with established investigators pursuing research in women’s health and in the mechanisms underlying sex differences in health…
Benjamin L. Ebert, MD, PhD, chair of medical oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) for his contributions to the understanding of the genetics, biology, and treatment of myeloid malignancies. Ebert is also the George P. Canellos, MD, and Jean S. Canellos Professor…
Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF), a leading funder of pediatric cancer research, has awarded a $4.95 million dollar grant to Leonard Zon, MD, of Boston Children’s Hospital through its Crazy 8 Initiative, which aims to provide detailed roadmaps toward cures for specific, hard-to-treat childhood cancers through collaborative research. Through this grant, “Barcoding Pediatric Leukemia for Therapeutic Purposes,” Zon will collaborate extensively…