From his earliest days in the laboratory, Joel Pomerantz got caught up in “the thrill that you can actually discover new things with your own hands, with your own mind.” As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, he spent a summer learning how to detect biochemical changes that enable…
Camila dos Santos (2016 RAF Scholar) and colleagues have found a potential target for killing breast cancer cells—a protein important for stem cell self-renewal.
Joshua Mendell launched his research career with a junior high science fair project on DNA mutation rates in bacteria. A graduate student who worked with his father, Jerry Mendell, a neurologist at The Ohio State University, assisted him with his project and taught him the basics of molecular…
A study led by Alex Kentsis (2016 RAF Scholar) has yielded new insights into how a “jumping gene” contributes to pediatric cancers.
Growing up in Corpus Christi, Texas, Elsa Flores was encouraged to follow her unflagging “curiosity about how things work.” Inspired by her father, an educator who studied biology and chemistry, Flores had always envisioned a career in science. But she felt uncertain about where to attend college—whether to…
2004 Rita Allen Foundation Scholar David Tuveson has been named Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Cancer Center.
Hilary Coller caught the biomedical research bug early—as a junior high school student she took part in research that resulted in a first-author scientific publication. Coauthored with her father Barry Coller, a blood and vascular biologist at The Rockefeller University, the paper explored a…
In 1990, Senthil Muthuswamy was a young graduate student in biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He had just moved to Canada from his native India after completing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural sciences at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and a master’s degree in genetics at…
Early-career biomedical researchers to examine the underpinnings of human behavior, cancer and chronic pain The Rita Allen Foundation has named its 2016 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars, recognizing seven young leaders in biomedical science whose research holds great promise for revealing new pathways to advance human health.
Bruce Stillman counts himself lucky to have been born in 1953, the year James Watson and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, and to have embarked on his research career during the early days of recombinant DNA technology. “It was almost perfect…