Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist; the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She has researched cell-to-cell chemical communication in bacteria and discovered key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. She has contributed to the idea that disruption of chemical signaling can be used as an antimicrobial therapy.
The UCLA School of Medicine is the accredited medical school of the University of California, Los Angeles. Founded in 1951, it is the second medical school in the University of California system after the UCSF School of Medicine. The school was renamed in 2001 in honor of media mogul David Geffen who donated $200 million in unrestricted funds.
Nicole King is an American biologist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and integrative biology. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 2013.
Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013.
Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies.
Lin He is a Chinese-American molecular biologist. She is an associate professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, where she leads a lab focusing on identifying non-coding RNA which may play a role in tumorigenesis and tumor maintenance.
Norman Richard Pace Jr. is an American biochemist, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado. He is principal investigator at the Pace lab.
Geraldine C. Seydoux is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics (1995–present), the Huntington Sheldon Professor in Medical Discovery (2015–present), and the Vice Dean for Basic Research (2017–present) at Johns Hopkins University. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Laura Lee Kiessling is an American chemist and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kiessling's research focuses on elucidating and exploiting interactions on the cell surface, especially those mediated by proteins binding to carbohydrates. Multivalent protein-carbohydrate interactions play roles in cell-cell recognition and signal transduction. Understanding and manipulating these interactions provides tools to study biological processes and design therapeutic treatments. Kiessling's interdisciplinary research combines organic synthesis, polymer chemistry, structural biology, and molecular and cell biology.
Sheila Nirenberg is an American neuroscientist and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. She works in the field of neural coding, developing new kinds of prosthetic devices that can communicate directly with the brain, and new kinds of smart robots. She is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” award and has been the subject of, or featured in, several documentaries for her technology for treating blindness.
Daniel H. Geschwind is an American physician-scientist whose laboratory has made pioneering discoveries in the biology of brain disorders and the genetic and genomic analyses of the nervous system.
Victoria J. Orphan is a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who studies the interactions between marine microorganisms and their environment. As of 2020, she is the Chair for the Center of Environmental Microbial Interactions.
Blossom Damania is a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is known for her work on oncogenic viruses that cause human cancer. Damania has also been serving as vice dean for research at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine since 2016.
Karla Kirkegaard is the Violetta L. Horton Research Professor of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She was the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 2006 to 2010. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on virology.
Jenny Tung is an evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist. She is Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a Visiting Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2024, she was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Tung co-directs the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, a long-term study of wild baboons in Kenya.
Jason De León is an anthropologist, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer (2013), and a MacArthur Foundation 2017 Fellow. He studies the migration from Latin America to the United States of clandestine migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. De León is Loyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies, Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research/arts/education collective aimed at documenting and raising awareness about migration issues while also assisting families of missing migrants search for their loved ones.
Sallie Robey Permar is the pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medical Center and the chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her research focuses on infections affecting newborns.
Polina Valeriivna Lishko is an American cellular and developmental biologist. She was a 2015 Pew biomedical scholar. She is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley as well as an adjunct professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Antoni Ribas is a Spanish American physician–scientist. He is a Professor of Medicine, Surgery, and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Director of the Tumor Immunology Program at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Ribas served as president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in 2021–2022.
Ashley L. Shade is a Director of Research with the Institute of Ecology and the Environment of Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Shade is an adjunct associate professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences. She is best known for her work in microbial ecology and plant-microbe interactions.
