Tae Hoon Kim began his training in bioinformatics before the term even entered common usage. As a college intern in the early 1990s at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, he learned state-of-the-art computational methods for analyzing DNA sequences. His work contributed to a new understanding…

Three Rita Allen Foundation Scholars have received awards from the National Institutes of Health for their proposals “to use highly innovative approaches to tackle major challenges in biomedical research.” Jeffrey Macklis (a 1991 Scholar, as well as a member of the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee) and…

Peter Reddien delights in reviving what he calls “one of the grand problems of biology.” He applies modern molecular tools to study regeneration in planarian flatworms—a phenomenon first documented by scientists as early as 1766. These freshwater creatures, which are a few millimeters long, can replace a…

Johanna Joyce’s first task as a research scientist was to clone a chicken gene. This was in the 1990s, when she was an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. At the time, she says, “cloning a gene was a big deal—it seems trivial now.” Johanna Joyce(Photo:…

Adrian Salic spent many hours of his childhood tinkering with a microscope alongside his grandfather, a retired physician. He recalls sifting through a collection of old histology slides, gazing at the varied structures of healthy and diseased human tissues. Adrian Salic(Photo: Courtesy of Adrian Salic)…

Biochemist Peter Kim has explored how the twists, turns and movements of molecules conspire to produce stunning biological effects. He has also made some radical shifts in his own career, including shutting down his lab for 12 years to serve as a pharmaceutical executive. Now, Kim says, he’s…