Spotlight

Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Terrence Sejnowski, was selected as one of the 2022 Rising Stars in Engineering in Health, a program co-hosted by Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering and Columbia University to educate, train, and empower emerging leaders in academia at the intersection of engineering and biomedicine.

Salk President Rusty Gage was featured in the 2022 edition of the SD 500, the San Diego Business Journal’s annual list of San Diego County’s most influential business leaders. A leading neuroscientist, Gage directed the Salk Institute for five years.

In the study, published July 20, 2022, in Nature, Professor Kay Tye and team discovered the molecule in the brain responsible for associating good or bad feelings with a memory. The finding paves the way for a better understanding of why some people are more likely to retain negative emotions than positive ones—as can occur with anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Associate Professor Eiman Azim was awarded $100,000 to study how social isolation, anxiety, and depression affect movement. The Local Initiative For Excellence (L.I.F.E.) Foundation supports research to achieve better health outcomes for patients with brain and neurodegenerative diseases. His team explores how the brain controls movement of the body, focusing on dexterous behaviors, such as grasping a cup of coffee or catching a ball.

Charlotte Rambla, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Wolfgang Busch, was awarded the 2022 Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum Early-Career Award by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, a program that provides professional development opportunities for female wheat researchers in the early stages of their career in recognition of scientific excellence and leadership potential.

Chester, founder of the Linda Chester Literary Agency, died at her home in La Jolla, California, on December 9, 2022. She was 76. At the Salk Institute, Chester served as International Council liaison from 2007 to 2009 and as member of the Board of Trustees from 2009 to 2015. She was very committed to Salk Women & Science, serving on the program’s advisory board, and she often attended Symphony at Salk.

Professor John Reynolds was named a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Reynolds is among more than 500 new AAAS Fellows who were nominated by their peers for their distinguished efforts to advance science. He and his team use computational modeling and a variety of other techniques to study the brain mechanisms involved in perception and conscious awareness.

Taneashia Morrell, a senior contracts and licensing associate in Salk’s Office of Technology Development, will oversee two of the group’s four major DEI committees—the Anti-Racism Committee and the Dialogue on Diversity Committee—for 2023.

Professors Joseph Ecker, Ronald Evans, Rusty Gage, Christian Metallo, Satchin Panda, Reuben Shaw, and Kay Tye, along with Assistant Professor Jesse Dixon, were named to the Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate. The list identifies researchers who demonstrate “significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers.” Additionally, Professor Joanne Chory and Professor Emerita Catherine Rivier were named among the 1,000 Best Female Scientists in the World, an inaugural ranking by Research.com that celebrates the contributions of women in science. Evans and Gage were also ranked in the top 100 Best Scientists in the World, an inaugural ranking also by Research.com that identifies leading experts in specific fields of research.

American Cancer Society Professor Tony Hunter, Professor Reuben Shaw, and Assistant Professor Graham McVicker were among 12 inaugural 2022 Discovery Grant winners. The awards, which total $3 million, were launched last year by Curebound, a philanthropic organization dedicated to funding collaborative cancer research that has the potential to reach patients. Salk’s three collaborative projects include examining genetic mutations in pediatric cancer testing new therapeutics for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, and targeting potential new breast cancer therapeutics.

The Institute welcomed Assistant Professor Deepshika Ramanan to the faculty. Ramanan is an innovative researcher studying how the maternal immune system changes during pregnancy and breastfeeding and affects immunity and inflammation in babies across multiple generations. Her lab, part of Salk’s NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, opened in March 2023.

The San Diego Nathan Shock Center, directed by Professor Gerald Shadel, received new funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enroll participants from the Rancho Bernardo Study of Healthy Aging into their own clinical cohort to study cellular differences in how individuals age. Initiated 50 years ago, the Rancho Bernardo Study is one of the longest, continuously NIH-funded studies in existence.

Professor Thomas Albright, Salk Fellow Talmo Pereira, and Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein teamed up with curators and design experts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to study how nearly 100,000 museum visitors respond to exhibition design. The goal of the project is to better understand how people perceive, make choices in, interact with, and learn from a complex environment, and to further enhance the educational mission of museums through evidence-based design strategies. The exhibition—“Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection”—is open until May 21, 2023.