Awards + Announcements

Whitehead Fellow Aditya Raguram has received a 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. The prestigious funding award will support his work developing cell-derived bioparticles into safe and efficient vehicles for delivering therapeutic proteins into cells. 

Whitehead Institute has appointed Na Sun, a 2024 PhD graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as the inaugural AI Fellow within the Whitehead Fellows Program.

The Whitehead Institute together with the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) invites applications for a tenure-track appointment at
the Assistant Professor level.

Whitehead Institute graduate student researchers Christopher Giuliano and Julian Roessler have been awarded the 2024 Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation. In addition, postdoctoral researcher Chen Weng was selected as a finalist in the postdoctoral fellows competition.

Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring has been selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of just 26 scientists appointed in 2024.

The Whitehead Institute Board of Directors has elected two experienced leaders to its ranks: biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry executive Dr. Deborah Dunsire; and Micho Spring, a strategic communications expert who led a major global consulting practice.

The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience has selected Whitehead Institute Member Siniša Hrvatin to receive a 2024 McKnight Scholar Award, which is given to exceptional young scientists who demonstrate the potential for having important impact through their basic science studies of the brain and their discoveries’ translation to clinical practice.

The International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT) has awarded Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch the ISTT Prize, recognizing his exceptional contribution to the field of animal transgenesis over the past five decades.

Whitehead Institute Director and President Ruth Lehmann has been named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. The Fellowship of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, has been honoring excellence in science for over 360 years.

As part of the Whitehead Institute Board of Directors’ strategy for continuing renewal, three highly regarded Board members will leave those roles this July. Each has made significant contributions to the organization’s ongoing capacity to conduct cutting-edge biomedical research and to train future scientific leaders.