The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group awarded five researchers their Allen Distinguished Investigator awards for their groundbreaking work in evolution, epigenetics, and aging—made in a public announcement on June 15th . Three of the awards went to researchers in the field of epigenetics, with the remaining two awarded to those working on the principles of evolution and on aging.
“Epigenetics, aging and evolution are all fields with great impact on human health and wellbeing, but that currently face significant gaps in knowledge,”; says the Executive Director of the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, Tom Skalak, Ph.D. “With these awards, we hope to make strides toward the kind of breakthrough insights that can change the direction of an entire area of research.”
Through their awards program the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group identifies and funds individuals who are working on potentially breakthrough research having a global impact. Each of the awards provides $1.5 million in funding for three years, for a total of $7.5 million.
The three awards in epigenetics, or the science of how genes are turned on and off in cells, were awarded to:
- Charles A. Gersbach, Ph.D., Duke University, for his work at simplifying study of epigenetic regulation in neuron types of the brain by developing technology to generate specific neurons.
- Jan Ellenberg, Ph.D., European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and Ralf Jungmann, Ph.D., Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and LMU Munich, for combining biophysics and chemical biology to map the full three-dimensional epigenome in human cells and study how the structures react during gene repression and activation.
- Fei Chen. Ph.D., Broad Institute, and Jason Buenrostro, Ph.D., Broad Institute and Harvard University, for the ongoing development of technologies to visualize a cell’s genome architecture to sequence specific regulatory elements in cells.
The awards in aging and evolution were given to:
- Steve Horvath, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, for developing a method to measure the age of human tissues through chemical changes in the DNA, potentially unlocking methods to slow the aging process.
- Rachel Whitaker, Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for her work to model mobile genetic elements and how they interact with evolution in a human system.
