In a ceremony at Harvard University’s Loeb House on May 6, 2015, Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier recognized HMS neurobiologist Rachel Wilson as the first recipient of the Martin Family Professorship in Basic Research.
The professorship was made possible by the Warren Alpert Foundation, led by longtime HMS benefactors and Board of Fellows members Herb and Bevin Kaplan. It honors Joseph Martin, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at HMS, who served as dean of HMS from 1997 to 2007.
“We have the opportunity not only to honor the legacy of one of HMS’s most philanthropic families, but also to recognize one of the School’s best minds in our inaugural incumbent, Rachel Wilson, and finally, to pay tribute to one of its great leaders, my predecessor as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Joe Martin—truly a trifecta of honorees,” Flier said at the event.
Wilson joined the HMS faculty as an assistant professor in 2004, “opened her own lab and immediately started making waves in the neurobiology community,” said Flier. “She was appointed associate professor in 2009 and full professor in 2012—certainly a meteoric rise by Harvard Medical School standards.”
Wilson’s innovative research into sensory processing and neural circuitry in the fruit fly earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 2010 and the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2014.
In addition to her research, Wilson is associate director of the Harvard PhD Program in Neuroscience and co-directs the HMS graduate course in neural circuit analysis. In 2011, she received an HMS Young Mentor Award.
Michael Greenberg, the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at HMS, spoke about Wilson’s remarkable accomplishments.
When Martin retires from the HMS faculty, the professorship will be renamed the Joseph B. Martin Professorship in Basic Research.
