Major grants will support ten pioneering early-career biomedical scientists. The Rita Allen Foundation has named its 2019 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars, celebrating ten young leaders in the biomedical sciences whose research holds exceptional promise for revealing new pathways to advance human health. The selected Scholars will receive…

Mark Zylka discovered the excitement of pursuing a scientific question in high school. His high school science teacher, Robert Foor-Hogue, led a hands-on course in which Zylka and the other students designed research experiments to address their individual burning scientific questions. It was then that Zylka appreciated that the…

A series of bold experiments led Li-Huei Tsai to her career-defining turn toward neuroscience.

From his earliest experiments, Ron Vale has investigated the movements that make life possible: the productive growth of plants, the division of cells, and the transit of signals through the long axons of neurons. His work, both within the laboratory and beyond, is marked by a persistent…

Tenth class of early-career pain researchers to investigate key regulators of pain signaling, inform new therapeutic strategies The Rita Allen Foundation has named Helen Lai of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Candice Paulsen of Yale University as 2018 Award in Pain Scholars, recognizing emerging leaders in…

Several Rita Allen Foundation Scholars have explored the genetic and cellular mechanisms that enable living things to adapt and survive in the face of an ever-changing environment. With support from the Foundation, these pioneering researchers have developed new ways to study the complex dynamics of DNA, track the activity of…

Susan Dymecki, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, has been named to the Rita Allen Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee. The Committee consists of leading scientists and clinicians from outstanding research institutions. Drawing on their collective experiences in medical discovery and development, members of the Committee…

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…