The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The majority of NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of the Washington metropolitan area, with other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.
Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist and Nobel Laureate who specialises in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. In 1997, he became founding director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Since 1999, he has been an honorary professor at Leipzig University; he currently teaches molecular evolutionary biology at the university. He is also an adjunct professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
The Crafoord Prize is an annual science prize established in 1980 by Holger Crafoord, a Swedish industrialist, and his wife Anna-Greta Crafoord. The Prize is awarded in partnership between the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Crafoord Foundation in Lund. The Academy is responsible for selecting the Crafoord Laureates. The prize is awarded in four categories: astronomy and mathematics; geosciences; biosciences, with particular emphasis on ecology; and polyarthritis, the disease from which Holger severely suffered in his last years.
The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) is one of the institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is an institute of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland.
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents, and for over 12 years.
Eric D. Green is an American genomics researcher who had significant, start-to-finish involvement in the Human Genome Project. He is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a position he has held since 2009. Green is an ardent St. Louis Cardinals fan.
McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of three NIH funded large-scale sequencing centers in the United States. Affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine and the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center, the McDonnell Genome Institute is creating, testing and implementing new approaches to the study of genomics with the goal of understanding human health and disease, as well as evolution and the biology of other organisms.
Stephen Craig West FRS is a British biochemist and molecular biologist specialising in research on DNA recombination and repair. He is known for pioneering studies on genome instability diseases including cancer. West obtained his BSc in 1974, and his PhD in 1977, both from Newcastle University. He is currently a Principal Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He is an honorary Professor at University College London, and at Imperial College London. In recognition of his work he was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007, is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2022 Royal Medal for 'discovering and determining the functions of key enzymes that are essential for DNA recombination, repair and the maintenance of genomes'.
Julie Angela Segre is the Chief and Senior Investigator of the Translational and Functional Genomics Branch in the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Elaine Ann Ostrander is an American geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. She holds a number of professional academic appointments, currently serving as Distinguished and Senior Investigator and head of the NHGRI Section of Comparative Genomics; and Chief of the Cancer Genetics and Comparative Genomics Branch. She is known for her research on prostate cancer susceptibility in humans and for conducting genetic investigations with the Canis familiaris —the domestic dog— model, which she has used to study disease susceptibility and frequency and other aspects of natural variation across mammals. In 2007, her laboratory showed that much of the variation in body size of domestic dogs is due to sequence changes in a single gene encoding a growth-promoting protein.
The New York Genome Center (NYGC) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit academic research institution in New York, New York. It serves as a multi-institutional collaborative hub focused on the advancement of genomic science and its application to drive novel biomedical discoveries. NYGC's areas of focus include the development of computational and experimental genomic methods and disease-focused research to better understand the genetic basis of cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and neuropsychiatric disease. In 2020, the NYGC also has directed its expertise to COVID-19 genomics research.
Amalia Dutra, Ph.D, is a Uruguayan-American genetic biologist known for being part of the team that mapped the human genome.
Frederick J. "Fred" Ramsdell is an American immunologist. Ramsdell graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in biology and from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1987 with a Ph.D. in immunology. As a postdoc he worked at the National Institutes of Health and subsequently in biotech companies in the Seattle area. He has served as a senior executive at several biotech companies Darwin Molecular/Celltech, ZymoGenetics, Novo Nordisk, and aTyr Pharma. Since the beginning of 2016, he has been Research Director at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco.
Lars Klareskog is a Swedish physician, immunologist, and rheumatologist, known for research into the genetics of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
VEXAS syndrome is an adult-onset autoinflammatory disease primarily affecting males, caused by a somatic mutation of the UBA1 gene in hematopoietic progenitor cells. The name VEXAS is an acronym deriving from the core features of disease:
Neil Hanchard is a Jamaican physician and scientist who is clinical investigator in the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), where he leads the Childhood Complex Disease Genomics section. Prior to joining NHGRI, he was an associate professor of molecular and human genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine. He is a fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics,. Hanchard's research focuses on the genetics of childhood disease, with an emphasis on diseases impacting global health.
Adebowale A. Adeyemo is a Nigerian physician-scientist and genetic epidemiologist specialized in genomics and cardiometabolic disorders. He is the deputy director and chief scientific officer of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the National Human Genome Research Institute.
David B. Beck is an American physician-scientist, clinical geneticist, and researcher who co-discovered VEXAS Syndrome. He holds dual appointments as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, and is a member of the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics and the Division of Rheumatology at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health.
(age 71)