News & Comment

Jeffrey Friedman recalls the heady excitement when his group discovered leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite.

Lieping Chen describes how his discoveries with PD-L1 yielded life-saving treatments for several cancers.

Johanna Joyce describes how disrupting tumor-associated macrophages showed the importance of the tumor microenvironment in treating cancer.

Rusty Gage describes how evidence for neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus shaped our understanding of learning, memory and mental health.

Brian J. Druker describes how his research on imatinib validated protein kinases as therapeutic targets for cancer and led to a life-saving treatment for leukemia.

T. Jake Liang describes how meeting a patient with fulminant hepatitis led to a collaboration that resulted in the first infectious clone of hepatitis C virus.

Shivani Misra describes how meeting a misdiagnosed patient early in her career led her to study precision diabetes in underrepresented groups.

Fortunate Machingura heads CeSHHAR Zimbabwe’s Climate, Environment, and Health Department and is also a lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She describes her pivot from HIV research to another crucial challenge facing Africa: climate change.

Juliane Fonseca de Oliveira is a mathematician at CIDACS in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She describes her part in building an epidemiological model to analyze the diverse populations within the 100 Million Brazilians Cohort.

Kizzmekia ‘Kizzy’ Corbett, a viral immunologist and research fellow, is the team lead for coronavirus research within the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health.

Matthias Trost is a biochemist and mass spectrometrist working at Newcastle University. He is currently leading the university’s effort in supporting the National Health Service with COVID-19 screening.

Francesco Paolo Russo, an Associate Professor of Gastroenterology at the Department of Surgery, Oncology and Gastroenterology of the University Hospital in Padua, Italy, talks about carrying out research, teaching and clinical work in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rickie Patani is Professor of Human Stem Cells and Regenerative Neurology at University College London and The Francis Crick Institute, and is a consultant neurologist at The National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square, London. He has over a decade of experience using human stem cell models of neurodegeneration, and his research contributions have been recognized by the International Paulo Gontijo Award in Medicine and the International 3Rs prize.

Tolullah ‘Tolu’ Oni is an urban epidemiologist at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge and a Next Einstein Forum Fellow and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Muzlifah Haniffa is a dermatologist working at Newcastle University and Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her achievements were recognized by the 2019 Foulkes Foundation Medal awarded by the Academy of Medical Sciences. She also plays a pioneering role in the Human Cell Atlas initiative.

Xiling Shen is the Hawkins Family Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health at Duke University. He is a National Science Foundation early-career awardee, chair of the National Cancer Institute’s Patient-Derived Models of Cancer consortium and an Israeli faculty fellow.

Rachel Ramoni is chief research and development officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, where she oversees 2,000 active projects at more than 100 sites.

Julie Makani is an associate professor in the Department of Haematology and Blood Transfusion at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, where she helped Tanzania establish one of the world’s largest single-center study cohorts for sickle cell disease. She received the 2011 Royal Society Africa Award on the translation of genomics to health benefits.