Kaelin Wins Gairdner Award

William G. Kaelin, an HHMI investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, was one of five scientists awarded 2010 Canada Gairdner International Awards from the Gairdner Foundation. Each award carries a $100,000 cash prize. The annual Gairdner awards recognize leading medical researchers around the world. Kaelin shares his award with Peter J. Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford and Gregg L. Semenza of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for their studies on how cells sense oxygen levels.

Thomas Südhof Awarded Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters named Thomas Südhof, an HHMI investigator at Stanford University School of Medicine, as one of eight recipients of 2010 Kavli Prizes. The eight scientists will share $3 million in prize money. Südhof shares the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Richard H. Scheller of Genentech and James E. Rothman of Yale University for their work on how neurons in the brain communicate with each other.

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Carolyn Bertozzi Awarded Lemelson-MIT Prize

Carloyn Bertozzi, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, won the 2010 Lemelson-MIT Prize. The prestigious $500,000 award recognizes an outstanding inventor or innovator each year. Bertozzi is the first woman to receive the prize, and among the youngest recipient.

Bertozzi studies sugar molecules, called glycans, that are vital to cellular pathways throughout the body. She aims to develop chemical and nanoscale tools to probe biological processes involving glycans. Her team invented the world’s first chemical reaction to add a marker to sugars or proteins, allowing researchers to trace their paths as the molecules move throughout an organism.

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Lee Wins National Academy Award

HHMI investigator Jeannie T. Lee, of Massachusetts General Hospital, won the 2010 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology. Each year, the award recognizes a young scientist who has made a notable discovery. Lee was chosen for her research using X-chromosome inactivation as a system to study epigenetic regulation on a broader scale. She has found that genes responsible for X chromosome inactivation can also inactivate parts of other chromosomes.

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William Newsome Receives the Champalimaud Vision Award

HHMI investigator William T. Newsome, of Stanford University School of Medicine, received the 2010 Champalimaud Vision Award for his research on the neural circuits underlying vision and visually based decision making. The $1.3 million prize is given annually by the Champalimaud Foundation. In odd-numbered years it recognizes accomplishments in preventing blindness in developing countries, and in even-numbered years honors a scientist for outstanding vision research.

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Frontiers of Knowledge Award Goes to Lefkowitz

The BBVA Foundation selected Robert J. Lefkowitz, an HHMI investigator at Duke University, to receive the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine. This is the second year that the 400,000 euro prize has been given. Lefkowitz was honored for discovering G protein-coupled receptors, now the largest family of cell receptors known.

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Keio Prize Goes to Friedman

The 2009 Keio Science Prize was awarded to HHMI investigator Jeffrey M. Friedman in recognition of his research on hormones that regulate food intake and body weight. Friedman, of The Rockefeller University, studies leptin, a molecule linked to appetite and obesity. Friedman discovered, using techniques in neurobiology and genetics, that when an animal loses weight, leptin concentrations fall and this causes the animal to search for food. The Keio Prize carries a monetary value of 20 million yen (about $220,000) and is given annually by Keio University, in Japan, for outstanding research in medical science.

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Fuchs Wins Medal of Science and L’Oréal-UNESCO Award

Elaine Fuchs, an HHMI investigator at The Rockefeller University, received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama at a ceremony at the White House in October 2009. Eight other scientists were also presented medals—the nation’s highest honor for science.

Fuchs was honored for her research on skin and hair—two distinct structures that develop from the same skin stem cell. Her work has made inroads into understanding hair growth and how defective stem cells can cause cancer. Fuchs also is the North American recipient of the 2010 L’Oréal-UNESCO Award in the Life Sciences, which recognizes outstanding and inspirational women scientists from five regions around the globe each year. The $100,000 prizes are a result of a partnership between the cosmetics company L’Oréal and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

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