The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world. It is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United States. HHMI spends about $1 million per HHMI Investigator per year, which amounts to annual investment in biomedical research of about $825 million.
Sean B. Carroll is an American evolutionary developmental biologist, author, educator and executive producer. He is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and professor emeritus of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His studies focus on the evolution of cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society (2007), of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for Advancement of Science. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Charles S. Zuker is a Chilean molecular geneticist and neurobiologist. Zuker is a Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and a Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1989.
Gerald Mayer Rubin is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Related to his genomics work, Rubin's lab is notable for development of genetic and genomics tools and studies of signal transduction and gene regulation. Rubin also served as a vice president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2003–2020) and founding executive director of its Janelia Research Campus.
Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and a founding member of the Neuronal Cell Biology Program at Janelia. Previously, she was the Chief of the Section on Organelle Biology in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program, in the Division of Intramural Research in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 2016. Lippincott-Schwartz received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and performed post-doctoral training with Richard Klausner at the NICHD, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.
Selden Island is a 408-acre island in the Potomac River, located about 32 km (20 mi) WNW of Washington, DC. It is about 4 km long and 0.4–0.5 km wide. Although it is located within Montgomery County, Maryland, the only road access is via a bridge connecting it to the Loudoun County, Virginia side of the river.
Janelia or Janelia Farm is a mansion and former farm near Ashburn, Virginia, built in 1936 for artist Vinton Liddell Pickens and her husband Robert Pickens, a journalist. The farm property has become the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which surrounds the house.
A Drosophila connectome is a list of neurons in the Drosophila melanogaster nervous system, and the chemical synapses between them. The fly's nervous system consists of the brain plus the ventral nerve cord, and both are known to differ considerably between male and female. Dense connectomes have been completed for the female adult brain, the male nerve cord, and the female larval stage. The available connectomes show only chemical synapses - other forms of inter-neuron communication such as gap junctions or neuromodulators are not represented. Drosophila is the most complex creature with a connectome, which had only been previously obtained for three other simpler organisms, first C. elegans. The connectomes have been obtained by the methods of neural circuit reconstruction, which over the course of many years worked up through various subsets of the fly brain to the almost full connectomes that exist today.
Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
Dr. Robert H. Singer received an undergraduate degree in physical chemistry from Oberlin College, and a PhD in developmental biology from Brandeis University. He did postdoctoral work in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Oberlin College granted Singer an Honorary Doctor of Science in 2016. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem granted Singer an Honorary Doctorate in 2018.
Neural circuit reconstruction is the reconstruction of the detailed circuitry of the nervous system of an animal. It is sometimes called EM reconstruction since the main method used is the electron microscope (EM). This field is a close relative of reverse engineering of human-made devices, and is part of the field of connectomics, which in turn is a sub-field of neuroanatomy.
Karel Svoboda is a neuroscientist. His research focuses on the question of how the neural circuits of the brain produce behavior. He has also performed notable work in molecular biophysics, neurotechnology, and neuroplasticity, particularly changes in the brain due to experience and learning. In 2021, he became the Vice President and Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics.
Barry J. Dickson is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
Duojia Pan is a Chinese-American developmental biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he is Fouad A. and Val Imm Bashour Distinguished Professor of Physiology, chairman of the department of physiology, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). His research is focused on molecular mechanisms of growth control and tissue homeostasis and their implications in human disease.
James "Jim" William Truman is an American chronobiologist known for his seminal research on circadian rhythms in silkmoth (Saturniidae) eclosion, particularly the restoration of rhythm and phase following brain transplantation. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and a former senior fellow at Howard Hughes Medical Institution Janelia Research Campus.
Hermann Steller is the head of the Strang Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nancy M. Bonini is an American neuroscientist and geneticist, best known for pioneering the use of Drosophila as a model organism to study neurodegeneration of the human brain. Using the Drosophila model approach, Bonini's laboratory has identified genes and pathways that are important in the development and progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease, as well as aging, neural injury and regeneration, and response to environmental toxins.
Marta Zlatic is a Croatian neuroscientist who is group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Her research investigates how neural circuits generate behaviour.
Na Ji is an American biophysicist and the Luis Alvarez Memorial Chair in Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley, where her work focuses on optical microscopy techniques for in vivo imaging and biophotonics. She has a joint appointment as faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Harald Frederick Hess is an American physicist and Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, known for his work in scanning probe microscopy, light microscopy and electron microscopy.
