Neurobiologist Wins MacArthur “Genius” Award
Rachel Wilson, HMS assistant professor of neurobiology, is one of 25 recipients awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes referred to as the “genius grant,” the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced.
All fellows will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years.
“In just a few years, Rachel has distinguished herself as a vital member of the HMS faculty,” said Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Faculty of Medicine. “She has taken on some of the biggest questions in neurobiology and developed elegant methods for gleaning answers to those questions.”
“I am thrilled that Rachel has achieved the high honor of receiving a MacArthur Award,” said Michael Greenberg, chair of the Department of Neurobiology. “She is a superb scientist whose research on olfaction is giving us some of the most penetrating insight into the rules that govern neural circuitry. This is wonderful news.”
Wilson has expanded on her initial training in neuropharmacology to develop a systems-level approach to understanding sensory physiology. In early work, she focused on the activity of nonclassical neurotransmitters in the mammalian hippocampus, a structure associated with long-term memory.
A key question in memory formation is how the activity of target neurons influences the strength of synaptic inputs; Wilson used electrophysiologic measurements to show that receptors for a class of neurotransmitters, endocannabinoids, play a key role in modulating inhibitory inputs in neurons associated with learning. More recently, she has taken on the challenge of understanding how the brain distinguishes different smells. In both vertebrates and invertebrates, primary olfactory neurons specialize in detecting single odorant types; the task of integrating their information for higher-order processing falls to a single level of intermediate neurons.
Wilson has developed sophisticated techniques for measuring the activity of these neurons in the fruit fly Drosophila. She has found that their activity can range from highly specialized to quite general. Since types of smells vary across many more dimensions than physical senses of light or sound, determining the neural activity patterns in olfaction represents an important step in sensory physiology and may serve as a template for understanding other, more abstract forms of neural representation, such as speech recognition or color.
By developing experimental models that integrate electrophysiology, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, functional anatomy, and behavior, Wilson opens new avenues for exploring a central issue in neurobiology—how neural circuits are organized to sense and react to a complex environment.
The LAM Treatment Alliance (LTA) has launched a new fellowship, the LTA Folkman Fellowship. The program is open to scientists conducting basic, clinical, or translational research that advances the Alliance’s mission of finding an effective treatment for Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare, multisystem disease that most often affects women in their mid-thirties in which clumps of cells and cysts grow throughout the lungs and other body systems and organs. Over time, these cells destroy the normal lung tissue, block the flow of air, and reduce oxygen intake. The fellowship is named for the late Judah Folkman, who served on the LTA’s scientific advisory board and who encouraged the creation of LAM fellowships.
The inaugural fellow is Sima Zacharek, an HMS research associate in genetics. Zacharek is attempting to find the cell of origin in LAM, which would allow for the development of an animal model of the disease.
The LTA is also planning to provide fellowships for students in the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
At a Sept. 18 ceremony in the Jeffrey Modell Immunology Center at HMS, Dean Jeffrey Flier and Bibi Good unveiled a portrait of Robert Good, Bibi’s late husband, who performed the first bone marrow transplant and is considered a father of modern immunology. The painting hangs in the Modell Center’s Robert A. Good Library. At the unveiling, Raif Geha, the James L. Gamble professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, said of Good, “if anybody was a giant in that field, he was.” Good had cared for Jeffrey Modell, the son of Fred and Vicki Modell; Jeffrey had suffered and later died from a primary immunodeficiency. In memory of their son, the Modells established the Jeffrey Modell Foundation, which supported creation of the Modell Center at HMS.
Honors and AdvancesThe incoming dean of HSPH, Julio Frenk, has received a Clinton Global Citizen Award from the Clinton Foundation, former president Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. Frenk was honored for his work as the minister of health of Mexico, where under his leadership health insurance access was expanded to cover tens of millions of previously uninsured Mexicans. Frenk will join HSPH in January, after dean Barry Bloom steps down from that position.
