Awards & Recognitions: October 2014

The Brain Injury Association of America named Joseph Giacino as the recipient of the 2014 William Fields Caveness Award. Giacino serves as the Director of Rehabilitation Neuropsychology and Disorders of Consciousness Program at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Network and as an associate professor physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.

This award is presented to an individual who, through research on both a national and international level, has made outstanding contributions to bettering the lives of people who have sustained a brain injury.

“Dr. Giacino’s seminal work in the field of disorders of consciousness is some of most important findings we have for treating these patient populations. His tireless advocacy and uncompromising focus on improving the approaches to care has benefited countless patients and families connected to brain injury. This recognition is well deserved and all of us at Spaulding are proud to count him as our colleague,” said Ross Zafonte, Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs, Research and Education at Spaulding Rehabilitation Network and Chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.

Giacino joined Spaulding and Harvard just over three years ago. In that short time he has further established himself as a leader in the field of rehabilitative medicine. He serves as the Program Project Director for the Spaulding-Harvard Traumatic Brain Injury Model System which seeks to improve the research knowledge base of the disease while also improving care and community resources. In his time at Spaulding he has been a prolific researcher including serving as the study leader on a major multi-national study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012 that revealed a significant breakthrough in the treatment of patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states. The study showed that the drug amantadine hydrochloride accelerated the pace of functional recovery during active treatment in patients with post-traumatic disorders of consciousness.

Frederick Alt.Frederick Alt, Harvard Medical School Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics and professor of genetics at Boston Chidren's Hospital at Boston Children's Hospital, has been awarded the 44th Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Biomedical Science. Alt is honored for his pioneering work in elucidating the mechanisms of genome rearrangements in immune and cancer cells.

Alt, who is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, became fascinated with changes in gene arrangement and expression in graduate school with his demonstration of the selective amplification of the DHFR gene in cancer cells resistant to therapy with methotrexate, studies which also provided the first molecular demonstration of genomic instability in cancer. Several years later, in his own lab, Alt showed selective amplification of the N-myc oncogene in neuroblastomas. The finding of a novel cancer-related gene, recurrently amplified in a specific type of human tumor, at a particular stage, was a landmark in showing that gene amplification is a fundamental mechanism underlying tumorigenesis. Much of Fred Alt’s work has focused on a set of programmed chromosomal rearrangements that occur during the development of the immune system. Alt’s lab has provided many of the insights into the mechanisms by which particular immune gene regions are activated for rearrangement in both B and T lymphocytes. His lab was the first to show that immune cell rearrangements depended on genes directing general repair of chromosome breaks and subsequently identified new factors and processes by which broken DNA segments are joined together. Alt’s focus on the mechanisms of joining distant broken DNA segments has continued with his more recent work on the origin of chromosomal translocations.

One major discovery, linking Alt’s earlier work on gene amplification with his study of the immune system, was the mechanism of oncogenic gene amplifications in repair-defective progenitor B lymphocytes that lead to lymphomas. By using new genome-wide DNA sequencing methodology his lab has described the spectrum of rearrangements arising between a specifically broken genomic segment and many other sites in the genome where breakage arises spontaneously or after irradiation. His work continues to unveil the complex mechanisms of chromosomal maintenance and the consequences of their inactivation.

Alt is currently also the Director of the Program in Cellular Molecular Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital. Among his many honors and awards, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received the Alfred Knudson award of the National Cancer Institute for “pioneering contributions that have revolutionized the field of cancer genetics,” and received important awards from the American Association of Cancer Research, the Cancer Research Institute, the American Association of Immunologists, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, as well as the Novartis Immunology Prize.

Ali Khademhosseini.Ali Khademhosseini, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, is the winner of the The International Union of Materials Research Societies – MRS Singapore Young Researcher Award. This award recognizes outstanding contributions by a researcher under the age of 40 in materials science and engineering. It will be presented at the 2014 IUMRS-International Conference of Young Researchers on Advanced Materials (24 – 29 October 2014) conference in China along with a plenary lecture.

NIH High Risk High Reward Grants

Eight Harvard Medical School affiliated researchers are among the recipients of eighty-five grants awarded to scientists proposing highly innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research, under the High Risk-High Reward program supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund. Awardees from previous years have made scientific leaps, established new scientific paradigms, and, in some cases, revolutionized entire fields.

"Supporting innovative investigators with the potential to transform scientific fields is a critical element of our mission,”’ said NIH Director Francis Collins. "This program allows researchers to propose highly creative research projects across a broad range of biomedical and behavioral research areas that involve inherent risk but have the potential to lead to dramatic breakthroughs."

NIH Pioneer, New Innovator, Transformative Research, and Early Independence awards encourage creative thinkers to pursue exciting and innovative ideas in biomedical and behavioral research.

Chenghua Gu.





NIH Director's Pioneer Award

Chenghua Gu,
HMS associate professor of neurobiology
New tools for understanding the blood brain barrier


NIH Director's New Innovator Award

Mark Andermann, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Multiphoton imaging of thoughts of food during natural and induced hunger states

Robert Anthony, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital
Glycoengineering In Vivo

Cigall Kadoch, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Reversing Oncogenic BAF Complex Structure & Function: New Therapeutic Approaches

NIH Director's Early Independence Award

John Hanna, HMS instructor in pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital
New Ubiquitin-Proteasome System Components that Protect against Proteotoxicity

Duncan Maru, HMS instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital
Integrating Pediatric Care Delivery in Rural Healthcare Systems

Yakeel Quiroz, HMS clinical fellow in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital
Memory network dysfunction as an early marker of preclinical Alzheimers Disease

NIH Director's Transformative Research Award

Alexander Gimelbrant, HMS assistant professor of genetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Mechanism and function of autosomal analog of X inactivation


Chuan Wu.Chuan Wu, HMS instructor in neurology in Brigham and Women's Department of Neurology, recently received both a Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a Career Transition Fellowship from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS).

The NIAID Pathway to Independence Award facilitates timely transitions from mentored postdoctoral research positions to stable independent research positions at an earlier stage than is currently the norm in the industry.

The NMSS Career Transition Award targets junior scientists who demonstrate both commitment and exceptional potential to conduct Multiple Sclerosis-related research. The award supports a two-year period of advanced postdoctoral training in MS research and the first three years of research support in a new faculty appointment.

The recognitions were awarded to support Wu’s research on the impact of salt on the immune system. His research will also further identify the functionality of novel T cell-related metabolic genes in autoimmune disorders in pre-clinical and clinical models.