Whitehead Institute Postdoc Izabella Pena Selected as a 2019 Pew Latin American Fellow

Cambridge, MA --  Izabella Pena, a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member David Sabatini’s lab, has been selected as one of this year’s ten Pew Latin American Fellows. Pena, who hails from Brazil, studies how cells calibrate their growth, metabolism, and proliferation based on nutrient availability, particularly how cells obtain nutrients from breaking down proteins. She will receive a two-year salary stipend to continue her research, and if she chooses to return to Latin America to establish her own lab after her postdoc, she will receive an additional $70,000 from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

“Pew is pleased to support these exceptional Fellows from Latin America, who are dedicated to advancing biomedical research and expanding scientific expertise in their home countries”, says Rebecca W. Rimel, Pew’s president and CEO.

Pena is the second Whitehead Institute postdoc to earn this honor. Angelina Bilate, a postdoc in former Whitehead Institute Member Hidde Ploegh’s lab, received a Pew Latin American fellowship in 2007. Sabatini himself was selected as a Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2003, as were Whitehead Institute Members Mary Gehring in 2011 and Jing-Ke Weng in 2014.

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David Sabatini's primary affiliation is with Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where his laboratory is located and all his research is conducted. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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