Five Harvard Medical School faculty members are among the 144 individuals elected this month to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
The newly elected members from HMS are:
- David Glass, senior lecturer on cell biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS
- Todd Golub, HMS professor of pediatrics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
- Ann Hochschild, the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Microbiology and chair of the Department of Microbiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS
- Henry Kronenberg, HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital
- Gary Yellen, the Dr. George Packer Berry Professor of Neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership and, with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.
Adapted from National Academy of Sciences communications materials.
Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award for her project Geometric Deep Learning to Facilitate Algorithmic and Scientific Advances in Therapeutics. The award supports early-career faculty who show exceptional promise as researchers and academic role models.
Zitnik’s work advances understanding of artificial intelligence, including geometric deep learning, multimodal learning, knowledge graphs, and foundation models. By developing innovative ways of using AI and developing new capabilities for machine learning technology, Zitnik and her team advance the state of the art of AI with applications in medicine and drug design.
Zitnik’s project will develop geometric deep-learning methods to analyze vast troves of data that form networks, aiming to understand the varied structures of molecules and proteins and the complicated ways they interact. Zitnik and her team will also develop AI methods that aggregate and analyze billions of molecular observations, creating molecular search engines that could identify useful molecules faster and cheaper than current drug discovery methods.
Adapted from press materials from the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural & Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University.
Martin Pollak, the HMS George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine and chief of nephrology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has been named a recipient of the David M. Hume Memorial Award from the National Kidney Foundation for his contributions to understanding the genetic basis of kidney disease.
A central focus of Pollak’s work has been identifying and understanding the genes implicated in the development of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS — a rare disease that causes scar tissue buildup in the parts of the kidneys that filter waste from the blood — particularly in populations with a higher predisposition, such as African Americans.
“I am deeply honored to see the work of my dedicated lab members, colleagues, and collaborators be recognized,” said Pollak. “We think that understanding kidney disease at a very fundamental level will provide the best chance of eliminating these diseases. It is imperative that we continue our commitment to studying the genetics and biology of kidney disease, as this understanding holds the key to prevention, early diagnosis, and effective treatment.”
Each year, the National Kidney Foundation honors specialists in nephrology who exemplify the organization’s relentless efforts to improve patient outcomes through action, education, and accelerating change. Pollak was presented with this award at the NKF’s Spring Clinical Meetings (May 14-18) in Long Beach, California.
Adapted from National Kidney Foundation press materials.
Shelly Greenfield, HMS professor of psychiatry and chief academic officer at McLean Hospital, has been named a 2024-2025 fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Radcliffe fellows are part of an interdisciplinary and creative community that steps away from routines to tackle projects that they have long wished to move forward.
Throughout the academic year, fellows convene regularly to share their works in progress with the community and the public. Radcliffe fellows develop new tools and methods; challenge artistic and scholarly conventions; and illuminate the past, present, and future.
Greenfield will explore a narrowing gender gap in the prevalence of substance use disorders over the past three decades. These substances include alcohol, opioids, and cannabis, with rising rates in women and girls across race, ethnicity, and lifespan, and resulting in serious substance-related health and social consequences, all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Greenfield will examine this trend, investigate the lack of gender-specific treatment for girls and women, and seek policy solutions to overcome barriers to prevention and treatment.
Adapted from Harvard Radcliffe Institute press materials.
Jun Huh, associate professor of immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, and his longtime research collaborator Gloria Choi, an MIT neuroscientist, have received The Marcus Foundation Medical Research Award to study the “fever effect,” a phenomenon in which symptoms of people with autism spectrum disorders seem to improve when they have a fever.
A pair of grants to the two institutions will provide $2.1 million over three years to support research that could eventually lead to therapies that mimic the effect of fever to similarly improve people’s symptoms.
“To the best of my knowledge, the ‘fever effect’ is perhaps the only natural phenomenon in which developmentally determined autism symptoms improve significantly, albeit temporarily,” Huh said. “Our goals are to learn how and why this happens at the levels of cells and molecules, to identify immunological drivers, and to produce persistent effects that benefit a broad group of individuals with autism.”
The Marcus Foundation has been involved in autism work for more than 30 years, helping to develop the field and addressing factors from awareness to treatment to new diagnostic devices.
Adapted from MIT Picower Institute press materials.
A research team lead by Carlos Ponce, assistant professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, has received the National Institutes of Health’s Complement-ARIE Challenge Prize for innovative ideas on how to model human biology.
The team’s winning solution, Interpreting Brains and Artificial Networks, was awarded $50,000 to support the development of a coding library called ATHENA-N to understand deep artificial neural networks and use outcomes as hypotheses that can be tested in the visual cortex.
Ponce’s team aims to use principles of visual neuroscience to demystify deep learning models that can be as accurate as or better than humans at image recognition but that have largely inaccessible internal analyses, making it difficult to know if these systems could malfunction and, if so, how to fix them.
The researchers hope that ATHENA-N, short for Analyzing The Hidden ENcoding in Artificial Neural Networks, will establish connections between artificial and biological neural encoding to enhance understanding of both fields. They hope the work will illuminate new biology, such as uncovering new functional neurons in the visual cortex, and help scientists develop AI systems that are transparent, trustworthy, and reliable for real-world applications.
Ponce’s project team includes Alireza Dehaqani, HMS associate in neurobiology; Luis Giordano Ramos Traslosheros Lopez, HMS research fellow in neurobiology; and visiting graduate students Antonio Montanaro, Olivia Rose, and Binxu Wang.
Adapted from NIH press materials.
Two researchers and their teams have received awards from Harvard University’s Star-Friedman Challenge for Promising Scientific Research, which provides seed funding for high-risk, high-impact projects that might not otherwise receive grants.
- Fei Chen, assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, for a project to develop libraries of stabilized peptides to characterize their cell-type activity in the nervous system. Peptides — small strings of amino acids such as insulin, oxytocin, and leptin — serve important functions in the body and hold promise as medicines, but they degrade quickly, making it hard to study and use them. The team aims to identify stabilization strategies for more than 100 bioactive peptides.
- Korkut Uygun, HMS associate professor of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, for a project that will explore whether microporous water loaded with nanoparticles that carry high densities of oxygen could enable longer preservation times for organs slated for transplantation and thus save more lives. The work aims to reduce the number of potentially transplantable organs, thousands of which are lost each year because of lack of oxygen while they’re stored and transported to recipients.
Sandra Shi, HMS instructor in medicine at Hebrew SeniorLife, has received the Health in Aging Foundation New Investigator Award from the American Geriatrics Society. This award recognizes individuals whose original research reflects new and relevant investigation in geriatrics.
Shi researches frailty and post-acute care outcomes in skilled nursing facilities. Her work leverages large databases, including national surveys and Medicare claims data. A recent project, which investigated the impact of pre-existing frailty on post-acute care outcomes, concluded that clinical frailty assessments may provide valuable risk stratification for post-acute skilled nursing facility care.
Adapted from American Geriatrics Society press materials.
