Awards + Announcements

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS).

The Whitehead Institute Board of Directors has elected two new, accomplished members for six-year terms: Michael Chambers, who founded and led a major biotechnology production company; and Terrance (Terry) McGuire, a leader of early stage investing in medical and information technology companies.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that Whitehead Institute Member Siniša Hrvatin is a recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, which supports potentially transformative biomedical research projects.

Kara McKinley is an assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University who studies the regenerative properties of the uterus. She completed her doctoral research in Whitehead Institute Member Iain Cheeseman’s lab in 2016.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has selected Whitehead Institute postdoctoral researcher Ngoc-Han Tran as a Hanna H. Gray Fellow.

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita has received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore the importance of maintaining ribosomal DNA repeats in the “immortality” of germ cells, which pass the genome on to an organism’s progeny.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has selected Whitehead Institute Member Ankur Jain to be a 2022 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew program provides funding to young investigators of outstanding promise who work in areas of science relevant to the advancement of human health.

Fran Lewitter, the founding director of Whitehead Institute’s Bioinformatics and Research Computing (BaRC) program from 1994 to 2014, has been named a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring was a featured presenter at a recent symposium sponsored by the MIT Climate Grand Challenges initiative.