Mosquitoes – responsible for transmitting malaria, Zika, dengue, West Nile, chikungunya, yellow fever – are mankind’s most successful serial killers. Whilst at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the NIH, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Program Scholar Dr. Gianmarco Raddi created the first cell atlas of mosquito immune cells and discovered new types of mosquito immune cells, including a rare cell type that could be involved in limiting malaria infection. Dr. Raddi and colleagues also identified molecular pathways implicated in controlling the malaria parasite. Their results – published in Science – are the most comprehensive transcriptomic study of a whole invertebrate organism immune system to-date and represent an important advance in the fight to eradicate malaria. The new knowledge will prove useful in developing vector control strategies not only for malaria, but also Zika and Dengue, as well as to further more fundamental immunological understanding in model systems such as Drosophila.
“We have carried out the first ever large-scale survey of the mosquito immune system, and using single cell sequencing technology we found immune cell types and cell states that had never been seen before. One of these cell types – the megacytes – appear to turn on anti-malarial defences. This is the first time a cell type has been associated to malaria infection control: it is a very exciting discovery” said Dr. Raddi.
NIAID: An Anopheles gambiae mosquito, one of the mosquito species which the study examined.
Looking to the future, Dr. Raddi aims to combine academic research with clinical medicine and journalism, with particular attention to acute medicine, global health and infectious diseases. As the public’s response to the coronavirus outbreak demonstrates, science and medicine are often not enough. Even the most effective medications or public health responses can be blunted by panic and scientific illiteracy. Doctors and scientists need to engage the public with both logos – that comes easy – and pathos. Dr. Raddi’s holy grail? A regular column, and the professional leverage to engage the wider public and help stem the tide of anti-scientific thought.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards to honor Scholars in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge/Wellcome Trust Scholars Program who demonstrate exceptional community service and leadership. These awardees were nominated by their peers to be recognized for their exceptional leadership and service, not only to the Scholars Program, but also to the greater community. It is always an honor to be recognized, but especially notable when the recognition comes from peers who have a unique and focused view of the awardee and their efforts. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
The recipient of the International Biomedical Alliance Leadership Award is a role model for their peers and possesses the ability to inspire others to be better and do better by encouraging creativity, cooperation, promoting respect for others, emphasizing collaboration, demonstrating initiative, and adapting to new and changing needs and circumstances. The outstanding Leader has a keen sense of organization and embodies leadership in all that they endeavor, combining clarity in thought with humility in character. The recipient of this award is Hannah Mason. Hannah is a fourth year NIH-Cambridge Scholar pursuing her PhD in the laboratories of Dr. Dorian McGavern at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD and Prof. Ole Paulsen at the University of Cambridge in the UK. She studies how the brain’s immune system responds to and is shaped by repetitive head injury and degenerative processes. After Hannah completes her PhD, she will attend medical school at Emory University.
The recipient of the Building a Better Community Through Service Award honors an individual who continuously places significant importance on the well-being of their community. Committed to social responsibility, they invest their time and talent to elevate and inspire others and, in doing so, uplift the community as a whole. The recipient of this award is Lauren Wedekind. Lauren is a third year NIH-Oxford Scholar pursuing her PhD in the laboratories of Dr. Robert Hanson at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Phoenix, AZ and Prof. Mark McCarthy and Dr. Anubha Mahajan at the University of Oxford in the UK. She investigates how genetic and environmental diversity jointly influence cardiometabolic disease etiology, to ultimately shape prevention and treatment strategies.
“I am continually in awe of the passion and perseverance of this year’s awardees,” said Katie Stagliano, PhD, Executive Director, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. “As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, our tight-knit community supports each other at home and abroad. Lauren and Hannah’s inspirational leadership and service gives me hope of a brighter future in science, health care, and our communities.”
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards designed to honor the achievements of alumni and newly-graduated students of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
Dr. Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, Bioengineering (BE), Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award which recognizes achievement of an exceptional nature in scientific and medical inquiry, professional practice, and enhancing the lives of others both personally and professionally. This Award is not given in recognition of a single remarkable achievement but is reserved for an NIH-OxCam alumni who has attained and maintained extraordinary impact throughout their career in their chosen fields of endeavor and in their service to society at large. Dr. Bassett completed her PhD in 2009 from Cambridge University. Her mentors were Daniel Weinberger and Ed Bullmore.
Dr. Bassett is well known for her work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. Her journey to academia was extremely unique as detailed in a feature article published in Science magazine (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/118). She is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant in 2014. She is the author of more than 290 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 22,000 citations (h-index 63), as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts.
Dr. Bassett is committed to extending her work beyond the sphere of academia and into the lives of the community, including presenting her work to middle school, high school, and college youth students. Dr. Bassett is also deeply committed to enhancing and supporting diversity in science. She has been involved in organizations supporting women in STEM since her time as an undergraduate. Since arriving at Penn, she spent 5 years as the Faculty Co-advisor for Society of Women Engineers. She has also given talks and engaged in discussions at many events advancing women in science. She is currently spearheading efforts in Penn’s School of Engineering to support LGBTQ+ graduate students, and serves as a formal point-of-contact for graduate students who would like to discuss issues of diversity or climate in Penn’s Department of Bioengineering specifically and School of Engineering & Applied Science broadly. More recently, Bassett has begun contributing to the scholarly study of gender and racial disparity in academia, and developing tools to mitigate that disparity. The work began with a study of “The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists”, now in press at Nature Neuroscience (2020; Preprint available here https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01002). Dr. Bassett’s laboratory has proven to be an excellent training ground for new scientists. Eleven graduate students or postdocs for whom Dr. Bassett has served as either primary or secondary mentor have been placed in faculty positions. Eleven graduate students have received their PhDs and have been placed in prestigious postdoc fellowships including positions at Princeton University, University College London, and University of California San Francisco.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards designed to honor the achievements of alumni and newly-graduated students of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
The 2020 Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was bestowed upon Dr. Jakob Seidlitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Founder of Cooperative Open Science Network (COSciN), aiming to bridge the gap between academia and industry. The Outstanding Recent Graduate Award recognizes the noteworthy and distinctive achievements of an individual who has graduated from the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars program within the last two years. The honoree embodies the values of scientific innovation and collaboration leading to seminal biomedical discoveries at an early stage in their career.
Dr. Seidlitz was also the recipient of the 2018 IBRA Innovation Award for novel solutions in biology or medicine for discoveries of unusual importance, application, or magnitude that make use of new or unusual methods, paradigms or approaches to solve important problems in biology or medicine. Dr. Seidlitz’s work focused on adolescence — a time of major physical, chemical, and biological changes, as well as a common period of onset for various brain-related disorders. It is crucial to develop methods that help achieve a full understanding of normative neurodevelopment, allowing better characterization of aberrant neurodevelopment. His work is focused on providing such an understanding through the use of brain networks generated from multimodal neuroimaging. He is looking at new ways to integrate multiple MRI contrasts in order to create a brain network “fingerprint” for an individual. In theory, these methods will be more robust to capturing an individual’s neurobiological profile, and thus more sensitive to inter-individual differences in behavior, cognition, and psychopathology. Dr. Seidlitz’s work was published in Neuron, with a related publication co-lead by another OxCam student in Science.
“I was delighted and humbled to receive the inaugural Outstanding Recent Graduate Award. My PhD, and the work being recognized herein, is representative of what makes the OxCam program so unique – the support and freedom to pursue curious and collaborative science. A big thanks to the directors and staff for this recognition, and for making the program what it was for me and what it is today,” remarked Dr. Seidlitz.
Dr. Seidlitz’s postdoctoral fellowship finds him collaborating with another NIH OxCam alumnus, Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch. Under a T32 training grant at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, they are working on imaging-genetic and imaging-transcriptomic methods and applications with a focus on development and neuropsychiatric disease. A graduate of the University of Rochester, Dr. Seidlitz received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 as a Scholar in the prestigious NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program under Dr. Armin Raznahan (NIMH/(NIH) and Prof. Ed Bullmore (Cambridge).
