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Allon Klein, Harvard Medical School, and Aviv Regev, Genentech, Recipients of National Academy of Sciences James Prize in Science and Technology Integration 2021 Award

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

The National Academy of Sciences will award the inaugural James Prize in Science and Technology Integration to Allon Klein, Harvard Medical School, and Aviv Regev, Genentech Research and Early Development, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They are receiving the $50,000 prize for “their concurrent development of now widely adopted massively parallel single-cell genomics to interrogate the gene expression profiles that define, at the level of individual cells, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states, which integrated tools from molecular biology, engineering, statistics, and computer science.” The James Prize honors outstanding contributions made by researchers who are able to adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields, integrating knowledge from two or more disciplines (e.g., engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, geosciences, astronomy, or computational sciences) to solve a major contemporary challenge not addressable from a single disciplinary perspective.   Klein is recognized for innovating high-throughput experimental and mathematical approaches to analyze single-cell transcriptomes at an unprecedented level of detail and discover how cell fate is decided in metazoan tissues. His work combines statistics and physics with molecular biology. He has mapped differentiation hierarchies, identified transitional developmental states to predict features of fate control, and discovered new cell types and regenerative programs. Regev is credited with forging new ways to unite the disciplines of biology, computational science, and engineering as a pioneer in the field of single-cell biology, including developing some of its core experimental and analysis tools, and their application to discover cell types, states, programs,  environmental responses, development, tissue locations, and regulatory circuits, and deploying these to assemble cellular atlases of the human body that illuminate mechanisms of disease with remarkable fidelity. The prize, made possible through a generous donation from Robert “Bob” James, will be presented to Klein and Regev virtually during the National Academy of Sciences’ 158th annual meeting.

Awards News   » Stay tuned! The 2021 NAS Awards recipients will be announced on January 21 with the NAS Public Welfare Medal announced on January 25. » In a recent episode of the podcast Clear+Vivid, hosted by 2016 Public Welfare Medalist Alan Alda, Marcia McNutt discusses her framework for delivering science in a crisis and how the National Academies are advising the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to listen.

SOURCE

From: NAS Awards Program <awards@nas.edu>

Reply-To: NAS Awards Program <awards@nas.edu>

Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 11:04 AM

To: “Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN” <AvivaLev-Ari@alum.berkeley.edu>

Subject: Inaugural James Prize in Science and Technology Integration Recipients Announced