News

Whitehead Institute Member Pulin Li has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The prestigious award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators. It is part of an NIH initiative supporting exceptionally high-impact studies addressing major research opportunities or gaps.

Whitehead Institute Member Sebastian Lourido has been selected as a recipient of a 2021 Odyssey Award from the Smith Family Foundation. The Award — which was created to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences — supports high impact ideas with the potential to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical research. 

The Lasker Foundation has honored Whitehead Institute Founding Director David Baltimore with its 2021 Lasker~Koshland Award For Special Achievement In Medical Science.

At the 2021 Whitehead Institute Annual Retreat, the majority of the Institute community—approximately 300 people—assembled together in person for the first time in more than eighteen months.

Jason Matos is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Jing-Ke Weng’s lab studying how plants make medicinal molecules. We sat down with Matos to learn more about him and his experiences in and out of the lab.

The Whitehead Fellows program is renowned for preparing emerging leaders in biomedical research and education. Two recent Fellows who made significant accomplishments while at the Institute are continuing that track record.

Researchers propose a new framework for how satellite DNA, sometimes called “genomic junk,” is essential in the organization of chromosomes in cells. They suggest this quickly-evolving DNA is one reason different species are unable to successfully interbreed.

This edition of Unusual Labmates, our series on the species used for research at Whitehead Institute, focuses on fruit flies. Fruit flies may seem like pests when they are encountered in the wild. However, they have been used in research for more than a century, and in that time, they have been engineered to become powerful, malleable models capable of answering questions in many areas of research.

Whitehead Institute Member Iain Cheeseman and collaborators have discovered how one critical protein is regulated to play multiple roles that help rewire cell division to create eggs and sperm.