- Rita Allen Foundation

All Scholars

Since 1976, the Rita Allen Foundation has awarded millions of dollars in grants to early-career biomedical scholars. These grants allow Rita Allen Foundation Scholars to establish labs and pursue research directions with above-average risk and promise. See below for a full list of Scholars, or read more about the Rita Allen Foundation Scholars program.

2012

Sreekanth Chalasani +
Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Sreekanth Chalasani

RELATED STORIES: Rita Allen Foundation Scholar Harnesses Sound Waves to Activate Brain Cells, Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Reveal Biological Forces That Underlie Responses to Change

Sreekanth Chalasani obtained a B.S. degree and an advanced diploma in computer science from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. He then did research at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, before coming to the U.S. in 1997. Chalasani obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Jonathan Raper, and did postdoctoral research in Cornelia Bargmann’s laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, and The Rockefeller University. He started his laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2010. In addition to the Rita Allen Foundation award, Chalasani has received awards including a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, a Basil O’Connor Starter Award from the March of Dimes, and a W.M. Keck Foundation Award.

Chalasani’s research addresses how the brain responds to changes in its surrounding environment. Neural circuits within the brain extract relevant information from the environment and regulate behaviors on timescales ranging from seconds to hours. A complete understanding of this process requires an ability to identify, record and manipulate all the participating neurons. It is difficult to obtain this level of access in a complex vertebrate brain. Chalasani’s group is using the nematode C. elegans, with its small, well-defined nervous systems, to decode the cellular and molecular mechanisms transforming environmental changes into behaviors. They have shown that C. elegans can evaluate the size of a patch of bacteria (its food) and uses that information to modify a behavior that lasts many minutes. In particular, they have identified sensory neurons that encode the size of a food patch by detecting large, but not small, changes in food. Moreover, they show that information about patch size is stored in the level of dopamine in the circuit, which acts to modify downstream sensory and interneurons. Also, they find that the rate of acquiring information is controlled by the amount of CREB protein in key interneurons in the circuit.
Christopher Hammell +
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Christopher Hammell

Christopher Hammell (Milton E. Cassel Scholar) attended the University of Georgia, where he received a B.S. degree in biochemistry. He then moved to Dartmouth Medical School, where he studied the mechanisms by which mRNA molecules are exported from the nucleus. After receiving his Ph.D., he began work with Victor Ambros at the University of Massachusetts, investigating how animals regulate the activity of microRNAs during development. He discovered a family of proteins, the TRIM-NHL family, that physically associate with and modulate the activity of the microRNA-induced silencing complex.

Hammell then began his independent research program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he switched his focus toward understanding how the temporal precision of developmental events is established. His current work centers on determining the regulatory architectures that ensure that developmental genes are turned on and off at the correct times.
Michael Jankowski +
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Michael Jankowski

Michael Jankowski (Award in Pain Recipient) earned an M.S. in neuroscience and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also conducted postdoctoral research. He joined the faculty of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in 2011. Jankowski has received several National Institutes of Health grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Arthritis,Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. He also is a recipient of an International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) Early Career Research Grant Award, and was named a Cincinnati Children’s Trustee Scholar in addition to being a Rita Allen Scholar. He serves on numerous grant review panels and journal review boards and is an associate editor for the journal PAIN and reviewing editor for Molecular Pain. He is on the training faculty in the Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Molecular and Developmental Biology Graduate Program at CCHMC. He is also a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the IASP and the American Pain Society.

Jankowski’s lab is interested in the peripheral mechanisms of pain development under unique injury conditions. His research has two main focuses: peripheral mechanisms of musculoskeletal pain, specifically in the context of ischemia; and the consequences of neonatal injury on developing sensory neurons. Ischemic muscle pain is a major health issue that occurs in numerous disorders, such as sickle cell anemia, peripheral vascular disease and even fibromyalgia. Many patients experience altered cardiovascular reflexes and musculoskeletal pain as a result of these disease states. Chronic pain in children, however, can arise from multiple sources, including surgery, inflammation or even neonatal intensive care. Yet we do not have a comprehensive understanding of the changes that occur in specific subtypes of sensory fibers after ischemic muscle injury or during postnatal development that modulate these distinctive pain states. Jankowski’s group utilizes a multidisciplinary experimental approach to obtain a broad understanding of pain development at the primary afferent level. These studies will hopefully lead to the development of treatments for adverse changes in cardiovascular reflexes or musculoskeletal pain associated with muscle ischemia, or novel therapies for pediatric pain.
Xin Liu +
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Xin Liu

Xin Liu earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Nanjing University in China and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted research in the laboratory of Ronen Marmorstein, carrying out structural and functional studies on the retinoblastoma and p300/CBP tumor suppressor proteins and their regulation by viral oncoproteins. Liu was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Roger Kornberg at Stanford University, where he studied the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. He is a W.W. Caruth, Jr. Scholar in Biomedical Research of the UT Southwestern Medical Center and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

In eukaryotes such as humans, genomic DNA is wrapped around histone proteins to be packaged into chromatin fiber. The 3-D chromatin structure exerts a profound impact on gene expression and is associated with human diseases, including cancer and developmental disorders, when dysregulated. Liu’s research is focused on understanding the structural and biophysical basis for formation of chromatin loop and facultative heterochromatin mediated by large macromolecular assemblies. His laboratory mainly uses X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, biochemical reconstitution and deep sequencing to achieve its research goals.
Michael Long +
New York University School of Medicine

Michael Long

RELATED STORY: Rita Allen Foundation Scholar Michael Long Reveals How Brain Circuits Help Birds Learn to Sing

Michael Long received a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in psychology from Rhodes College, and earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown University, where he worked with Barry Connors. He conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Michale Fee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and joined the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine in 2010. In addition to being a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar, Long has received an Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences and a Robertson Neuroscience Investigator award from the New York Stem Cell Foundation.

Sequential activity appears to be a broad feature in neural circuits and is thought to play an important role in orchestrating complex behaviors. These sequences can be generated in a number of ways, although we know very little about their underlying connectivity, making it difficult to predict a precise mechanism. Long and his colleagues have taken an anatomical approach to understand connectivity in the zebra finch HVC, a premotor circuit that drives a complex learned vocal sequence. Previous work suggested that the neural sequence in HVC emerges from a chain of synaptically connected projection neurons, but anatomical evidence for such direct synaptic connections is lacking. Long’s group identified a large number of premotor-premotor contacts and characterized their distribution along the dendrites and axon collaterals. Surprisingly, they found that proximal and distal connectivity is highly cell-type specific. Locally, premotor neuron axons primarily target interneurons, while distally they form most of their synapses with excitatory neurons, many of which are onto other premotor neurons. Their results show that monosynaptically connected premotor neurons are spatially decorrelated and suggest that the chain is propagated through linked winner-take-all modules.
Luciano Marraffini +
The Rockefeller University

Luciano Marraffini

RELATED STORIES: Foundation Scholars Earn NIH Awards for High-Risk, High-Reward Research, Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Reveal Biological Forces That Underlie Responses to Change
Sarah Ross +
University of Pittsburgh

Sarah Ross

Sarah Ross (Award in Pain Recipient) earned her B.Sc. from the University of Western Ontario and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, both in physiology. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where she worked with Michael Greenberg. She joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. In addition to the Rita Allen Foundation, she has received support for her work from the National Institutes of Health.

The spinal cord plays a critical role in processing somatosensory information. To study these spinal microcircuits, the Ross lab has developed a novel somatosensory preparation that allows recording from the output neurons (via retrograde labeling of spinal projection neurons) while controlling somatosensory input (via natural stimulation of the skin) and simultaneously manipulating activity of specific populations of spinal interneurons (via the combination of Cre alleles and optogenetics). Using this physiological preparation, the Ross lab is addressing long-standing questions in the field of somatosensation, such as: How is itch distinguished from pain? Why does scratching relieve itch? and How does pain become abnormally amplified upon injury?

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