Please join us in congratulating the four Mass General investigators who recently received director’s awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)! These awards are given to exceptionally creative scientists who propose innovative approaches with high-impact potential to major challenges in biomedical research.
Continue reading to learn more about each researcher and their proposed work as well as their reaction to receiving this award.
New Innovator Award
The New Innovator Award supports exceptionally creative early career investigators who propose innovative, high-impact projects.
Evan Macosko, MD, PhD
“I am delighted and honored that the NIH is willing to support this high-risk technology project. The lab can’t wait to get started on some potentially very impactful scientific work.”
Project Title: Slide-Seq: High-Resolution In Situ Expression Profiling for Neuropathology
Grant ID: DP2-AG-058488
Evan Macosko is a principal investigator in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad institute, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
His research focuses on developing and leveraging new technologies in genomics to characterize pathophysiological mechanisms in neuropsychiatric diseases.
As a postdoc in Steven McCarroll’s lab at Harvard Medical School, he developed a new method, Drop-seq, for performing highly parallel gene expression analysis of single cells from complex neural tissues.
He completed a psychiatry residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and is currently an attending psychiatrist at Mass General. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience and Genetics from Rockefeller University, and an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College.
Radhika Subramanian, PhD
“I am extremely grateful and honored to receive the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. The support provided by this award will allow my lab to pursue a new research direction where we will develop a versatile cell-free imaging platform that will enable us to decipher how spatial cues are encoded and decoded within cells.
We expect that the toolkit established here will be applicable for elucidating the fundamental mechanisms that govern the spatial organization of cellular reactions that underlie diverse cell-biological processes of biomedical significance such as cell division, migration, and development.”
Project Title: A Versatile Platform for Reconstructing the Spatial Organization of Intracellular Signaling During Cell-Division
Grant ID: DP2-GM-126894
Radhika Subramanian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
Her lab focuses on elucidating the fundamental principles by which intracellular spatial organization on the micron-length scale is achieved by the collective activity of nanometer-sized proteins.
She received her M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India and performed her doctoral research with Dr. Jeff Gelles at Brandeis University followed by postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Tarun Kapoor at the Rockefeller University.
In addition to the NIH New Innovator Award, Radhika is a Pew Biomedical Scholar and a recipient of the Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research.
Brian Wainger, MD, PhD
“I’m thrilled to receive the award. It’s a great honor, and I’m grateful for the hard work of my group, particularly Joao Pereira and Anna-Claire Devlin, that enabled it.
It’s also of course due to very strong support from MGH, the departments of Neurology and Anesthesia, Critical Care & Pain Medicine. And with the award comes an even greater responsibility to produce research that ultimately helps our patients – I’m excited and humbled by that.”
Project Title: A Human Stem Cell-Derived Neuromuscular Junction Model for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Grant ID: DP2-NS-106664
Brian Wainger is a physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Assistant Professor of Neurology and Anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School. He received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Princeton University and M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, where he worked on ion channel physiology with Steven Siegelbaum.
Following medical residency in the Partners Neurology Program and clinical fellowship in Interventional Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, he completed a research fellowship with Clifford Woolf at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Masters Program in Clinical and Translational Investigation at Harvard Medical School.
He is a Principal Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a member of the Harvard Neurobiology Program. His lab research focuses on modeling motor and sensory neuron diseases using stem cell technology and electrophysiology.
Early Independence Award
The Early Independence Award supports outstanding junior scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive, and maturity to flourish independently by bypassing the traditional post-doctoral training period.
Zirui Song, MD, PhD
“It is an honor to receive this grant and join an inspiring community of investigators. I am grateful to the faculty and colleagues who made my training possible.
This grant will allow me to continue my research on strategies to improve the value of care, including studying efforts to decrease costs, improve quality, and increase the sustainability of our public programs like Medicare.
In addition, this grant provides an opportunity to better understand how providers are leading delivery system reforms on the front lines and how different segments of the population are faring in the era of health care reform.”
Project Title: Inequities in Health Outcomes in the Twenty-First Century: Understanding New Causes and the Impact of Delivery System Reforms on Health Care Disparities
Grant ID: DP5-OD-024564
Funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
Zirui Song is an assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and an internal medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
His research has focused on health care spending and quality under new payment models for provider organizations, the impact of changes in Medicare physician payment policy, and the economics of health insurance in the Medicare Advantage program.
He received a B.A. in Public Health Studies with honors from Johns Hopkins University, an M.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School, and a Ph.D. in Health Policy, Economics track, from Harvard University, where he was a fellow in Aging and Health Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He completed his residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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