6 HMS Early Career Investigators Receive NIH Awards

Prizes encourage unconventional approaches to major challenges in biomedical research

Compiled by MIKE CAMPBELL Awards and Recognitions

2 min read

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Six HMS early career investigators received NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards from the National Institutes of Health. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports investigators who propose innovative research that, due to its inherent risk, may struggle within the traditional NIH peer-review process despite its transformative potential.

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The New Innovator Award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received an NIH R01 or equivalent grant.

“The science advanced by these researchers is poised to blaze new paths of discovery in human health,” said Lawrence Tabak, the current acting director of NIH. “This unique cohort of scientists will transform what is known in the biological and behavioral world. We are privileged to support this innovative science.”

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The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Recipients from HMS are:

Rachel Buckley, HMS assistant professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, whose field of expertise is in the investigation of sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), biomarkers in preclinical AD, focusing on what sex biological mechanisms might explain female vulnerability and resilience to AD pathology and subsequent cognitive decline.

Adam Granger, visiting scientist in the Department of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, whose research seeks to determine how the many different cell types in the brain interact with each other and how those interactions can go awry in psychiatric diseases.

Benjamin Kleinstiver, HMS assistant professor of pathology at Mass General, whose lab seeks to optimize and apply new protein engineering methods to accelerate the development of improved CRISPR technologies and to develop new capabilities for editing genomes, with the hope of transforming these tools into safe and effective genetic therapies.

Carlos Ponce, assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, whose research aims to discover and characterize the visual representations of the primate brain using machine intelligence approaches.

Silvia Rouskin, assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, whose lab uses experimental and computational approaches to measuring RNA structures in cells that have revealed genome-wide RNA structure heterogeneity in HIV-1 and the genomic structure of SARS-CoV-2 in infected cells.

Debattama Sen, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Mass General, who is investigating the regulation of T-cell dysfunction and exploring epigenetic approaches for T-cell engineering in an effort to develop novel therapeutic strategies.

The NIH issued eight Pioneer awards, 72 New Innovator awards, nine Transformative Research awards, and 14 Early Independence awards for 2022. Funding for the awards comes from the NIH Common Fund, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Cancer Institute.

Adapted from NIH press materials.