SPRING 2026
SPRING 2026
Salk’s donor-funded innovation and collaboration grants bring risky but rewarding science out of the dark Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest cancers and is projected to be the deadliest by 2030. Of the nearly 70,000 patients diagnosed annually in the…
Lucia Burrafato feels at home around art. She was born in New Jersey, spent her tweens and teens bopping around Pennsylvania, went to college in Queens, returned to New Jersey, moved back into the city, then finally took one long…
Postdoctoral researcher Ankita Chadda, PhD, is enjoying a new sense of security in the lab of Agnieszka Kendrick, PhD, at Salk. “She’s very straightforward and very planned, which I like,” Chadda says of her faculty advisor. “We meet every week…
If you’ve ever read an article about the “best ways to boost neuroplasticity” or scrolled through the “top 10 daily habits to rewire your brain,” you’ve already gotten a peek into an important and growing research area. The brain’s ability…
All the cells in an organism have the exact same genetic sequence. What differs across cell types is their epigenetics, meticulously placed chemical tags that influence which genes are expressed in each cell. Mistakes or failures in epigenetic regulation can…
How does our DNA store the massive amount of information needed to build a human being? And what happens when it’s stored incorrectly? Jesse Dixon, MD, PhD, has spent years studying the way this genome is folded in 3D space,…
Why is it that two people can develop the same infection but have dramatically different disease trajectories? Salk scientist Janelle Ayres, PhD, and her colleagues discovered that the kidney plays a key role in filtering inflammatory molecules out of the…
How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses? It largely comes down to variability in genetics (the genes you inherit) and life experience (your environmental, infection, and vaccination history). These two influences are imprinted on…
Dealing with an infection isn’t as straightforward as simply killing the pathogen. Our bodies must carefully monitor and steer the immune response to tackle the infection without hurting healthy tissues. If the immune system overreacts and leads to sepsis, this…
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