Elaine Fuchs is renowned for her research in skin biology, its stem cells and associated genetic disorders, particularly cancers and inflammatory disorders. She studies how stem cells make and repair tissues and how they withstand stress from wounds, mechanical trauma, inflammation and cancer-causing mutations. Following her Ph.D. from Princeton and postdoctorate at MIT, Fuchs joined the faculty at University of Chicago. In 2002, she relocated to The Rockefeller University, where she is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development. Fuchs has published >360 peer-reviewed manuscripts, and trained >30 PhD students and 70 postdoctoral fellows. Fuchs’ awards and honors include the National Medal of Science, L’Oreal-UNESCO Award, Albany Prize in Medicine, International Pezcoller Award in Cancer Research, EB Wilson Award in Cell Biology, Vanderbilt Prize, AACR Clowes Award, ISSCR McEwen Award for Innovation in Stem Cell Research, the Gairdner International Award and the Ben Franklin Medal in Life Sciences. Fuchs is an honorary member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Philosophical Society, Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. Her honorary doctorates include Harvard University. She is past-President of the American Society of Cell Biology and the International Society of Stem Cell Research. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Board of Directors of the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation, Scientific Advisory Boards of many international and national Universities and the Editorial Boards of major scientific journals. Fuchs has been a tireless supporter of women scientists in particular, and young scientists of all backgrounds.

Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor
Director, The Edison Family Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
For pioneering discoveries of the role of variation in the gut microbiome in modulating metabolism, health and disease.

Ruth Lehmann is the Director and President of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Professor in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lehmann received her Ph.D. with Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. After postdoctoral training at Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK, she joined the Whitehead Institute and the MIT faculty. In 1996 she was recruited to the then newly founded Skirball Institute at NYU Langone Health. She was Chair of the department of Cell Biology and directed the Skirball Institute at NYU Langone until 2020, when she re-joined the Whitehead Institute and MIT. She was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1990-1996 and from 1997-2020. A developmental geneticist and cell biologist, Ruth Lehmann studies the reproductive cycle. Focusing on fundamental questions, her lab has studied how germ cells, the precursors of egg and sperm, acquire their unique fate, protect it throughout the life cycle and assure transgenerational success by endowing the egg with all the information, genomic and epigenetic needed for successful development of the next generation. Her work on localized RNA translation and germ cell migration have been broadly recognized. Dr. Lehmann is a member of the American Academy of Arts Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of EMBO and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Most recent awards include the Vilcek Award, the Amory Award from the American Academy of Sciences, and the TH Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America in 2021, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics and the Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science in 2022. Dr. Lehmann serves on a number of scientific advisory boards and was the President of the Society for Developmental Biology and the American Society of Cell Biology.

Photo Credit: Vilcek Foundation/Ian Johns

Dr. Arthur Horwich, a geneticist, received undergraduate and M.D. degrees from Brown University, trained in Pediatrics at Yale, was then a postdoctoral fellow first at Salk Institute in the Tumor Virology Laboratory, and then in Genetics at Yale, then joined the Yale faculty. His work was initially involved with protein import into mitochondria and resulted in discovery of a "folding machine" inside mitochondria, Hsp60. He has used genetic, biochemical, and biophysical tools to study the mechanism of action of these ring shaped so-called chaperonin machines that provide essential assistance to protein folding in many cellular compartments. More recently he has focused on neurodegenerative disease as caused by protein misfolding, seeking to understand how misfolded SOD1 enzyme in the cytosol of motor neurons leads to one form of ALS.
In 2019, Dr. Horwich jointly with Franz-Ulrich Hartl, M.D. was the recipient of the Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research for their revolutionary insights into chaperone-mediated protein folding.

Michael N. Hall was born in Puerto Rico (United States) and spent his childhood years in South America (Venezuela and Peru) before moving to the United States to pursue his studies. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1981, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pasteur Institute (Paris, France) and the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the Biozentrum of the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1987 where he is currently Professor and former Chair of Biochemistry. Dr. Hall is a pioneer in the fields of TOR signaling and cell growth control. In 1991, Dr. Hall and colleagues discovered TOR (Target of Rapamycin) and subsequently elucidated its role as a central controller of cell growth and metabolism. Dr. Hall is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2014) and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2017).

James Allison is the Regental Chair and Professor of the Department of Immunology, the Olga Keith Wiess Distinguished University Chair of Cancer Research, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Research, and the Executive Director of the Immunotherapy Platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has spent a distinguished career studying the regulation of T cell responses and developing strategies for cancer immunotherapy. He earned the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Dr. Tasuku Honjo, "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." Among his most notable discoveries are the determination of the T cell receptor structure and that CD28 is the major costimulatory molecule that allows full activation of naïve T cells and prevents anergy in T cell clones. His lab resolved a major controversy by demonstrating that CTLA-4 inhibits T-cell activation by opposing CD28-mediated costimulation and that blockade of CTLA-4 could enhance T cell responses, leading to tumor rejection in animal models. This finding paved the wave for the emerging field of immune checkpoint blockade therapy for cancer. Work in his lab led to the development of ipilimumab, an antibody to human CTLA-4 and the first immune checkpoint blockade therapy approved by the FDA. Among many honors, he is a member of the National Academies of Science and Medicine and received the Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research award in 2015. His current work seeks to improve immune checkpoint blockade therapies currently used by our clinicians and identify new targets to unleash the immune system in order to eradicate cancer.