This fall, the NIH Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) Scholars were invited to Boston, MA for a Career Development and Exploration Initiative. Scholars curious about entrepreneurship and creating the next disruptive life science startup had the opportunity to visit Flagship Pioneering. Their goal is to create, resource, and build life sciences companies that invent breakthrough technologies to transform health care and sustainability. While at Flagship, Dr. Brad Coleman provided an overview of the Fellowship Program, which offers an unparalleled opportunity to apply scientific expertise, entrepreneurial talent, and a self-starter mentality toward creating the next world-changing startups and ventures in human health and sustainability. The Scholars met with previous Flagship Fellows and presented their research to current Flagship Associates. Following presentations, Former Flagship Fellow and Associate Director, Product Concept Explorations & Clinical Development at Pioneering Medicines Dr. Krystian Kozek invited the Scholars to tour Pioneering Medicines and answered their questions about his experiences and career path as an MD/PhD.
We asked the Scholars to consider how they could use the power of data science with AI/ML, genetics/genomics, and human-based experimental models. To better understand these intersections, the Scholars visited Flagship-founded Vesalius Therapeutics. Their goal is to elegantly combine human data, genetics and genomics information, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and proprietary experimental models to redefine how we think about and treat common illnesses. Vesalius Therapeutics leadership Dr. Chris Austin and Dr. Ben Munoz provided an overview and organized a meet and greet with their scientists. Dr. Chris Austin, who served most recently as the founding director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), shared his vast experiences through clinical medicine, academia, and industry over the last 30 years and provided insight for the Scholars.
The Scholars had the opportunity to converse with NIH OxCam Alumni throughout their time in Boston. Dr. Lynda Truong, Strategy Lead at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research arranged a tour for the Scholars. Drs. Brennan Decker, Michael Chen, Andrew Ishizuka, Molly Perkins, and Andrei Ramirez-Valdez chatted with the Scholars, sharing their experiences in industry, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and residency. MD/PhD Scholar Yasemin Cole and PhD Scholar Henry Taylor remarked on Brennan Decker’s reinforcement of staying connected to the NIH OxCam Program even upon graduation. Even though he graduated multiple years ago, Brennan keeps in touch with many OxCammers in Boston (not just those from his time in the Program) and has even helped several start their companies! PhD Scholar Christian Lantz shared that keeping a network of extremely impressive people will only help in the future!
Alumnus Dr. Stan Wang, CEO & Founder of Thymmune Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing a machine learning-enabled thymic cell engineering platform to restore normal immune function in aging and disease, met with the Scholars at LabCentral, a first-of-its-kind shared laboratory space designed as a launchpad for high-potential life-sciences and biotech startup. MD/PhD Scholar Dalton Hermans shared, “Meeting with Stan was a highlight of the trip for me. I feel, as an alumnus of the program, the tone of the conversation was a bit more candid. For that reason, I feel we learned a lot more about the technical aspects of start-up. I wrote down something Stan said that I have been thinking a lot about ever since, which is essentially, ‘In academia, scientists start with a solution that they have come up with and try to apply that to a disease and/or problem they can use it for. In biotech, scientists start with a need and/or problem for which there is a current therapeutic or economic gap and then try to come up with a solution to that need and/or problem.’ PhD Scholar Ray Smith remarked on the opportunities to learn about the intersection of biotech and academia and appreciated the range of experiences of the Alumni throughout the trip.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance is committed to providing Career Development and Exploration Initiatives to Scholars in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. These initiatives aim to ignite Scholar thinking around career opportunities where they can play a key role in the future of biomedical research enterprise. Please contact Alexandra Ambrico, Director of Communication, Education, and Professional Development, at ajambrico@biomedalliance.org if you would like to be involved in hosting future exposure visits.
Acclaimed American poet, educator, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou, once said that in order to be an effective mentor, one must care. She went on to say that an effective mentor should care about what they know, and care about the person they are sharing it with.
A mentor is many different things on different days but is always endlessly interested in the quality of the learning experience and the well-being of their mentee. In short, they care.
It has been a long-standing tradition of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program to pause each year to recognize an outstanding mentor among the many faculty members who serve the Program across the NIH, and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Nominations for this honor come from those who are the fortunate recipients of outstanding mentoring – the mentees.
Dr. Elodie Ghedin is the Chief of the Systems Genomics Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and is also our incoming Co-Scientific Director of the NIH OxCam Program. She was nominated by her mentee, Tung Nguyen, who shared the following sentiments.
“Elodie Ghedin has been a rare and considerate mentor who has helped me professionally and as a person. She responds within seconds of a message and has provided resources in data, online courses, and publication and conference presentation opportunities beyond what I had expected for my first year. She is the type of flexible mentor where if I have a wild idea, she can contact the right people for me to test it out.
I feel like a student with autonomy commensurate to that of a young investigator, sharing my boss’s excitement to pursue data-driven leads and temperament to dissect unexplained patterns. Importantly, this patience has led to discoveries and further hypotheses for SARS-CoV-2 genomic interpretation. I am establishing my own network through my OxCam affiliation across disciplines and conferences in part due to Elodie’s openness to maximize my education. My boss engages me with two-way dialogue and has provided unique resources for me to reach into the field of viral genomics and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been a privilege to be directly mentored by Elodie Ghedin, and to call her my mentor, boss, and friend. It is an honor to nominate her for this award.”
Congratulations Dr. Ghedin!
Exceptional mentorship continues to be a cornerstone feature of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program since its inception in 2001.
Acclaimed American poet, educator, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou, once said that in order to be an effective mentor, one must care. She went on to say that an effective mentor should care about what they know, and care about the person they are sharing it with.
A mentor is many different things on different days but is always endlessly interested in the quality of the learning experience and the well-being of their mentee. In short, they care.
It has been a long-standing tradition of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program to pause each year to recognize an outstanding mentor among the many faculty members who serve the Program across the NIH and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Nominations for this honor come from those who are the fortunate recipients of outstanding mentoring – the mentees.
Rachel Smith nominated Professor Ed Bullmore, of the University of Cambridge, stating “I am endlessly grateful for Ed taking a risk on me 2 years ago, when he agreed to work with me as a student though I had no experience in the field and big ideas with no solid foundation or background knowledge. As an extremely successful, end-of-career scientist he has every reason to fulfill the stereotype of the busy senior professor who is scarcely familiar with his students’ work. However, this could not be further from reality – Ed’s fierce dedication to mentorship is shown not just through the time and intellect he invests in improving his students’ science, but in getting to know us as people as well. When the other two PIs associated with our lab went on maternity leave around the same time, he intentionally cleared out time in his busy schedule to meet with all students in the group, including those whom he was not the primary supervisor for, one-on-one. I get genuinely excited for every one-on-one with Ed because I know talking with him will bring clarity and direction to my work, and I leave those meetings feeling better about life in general. He is funny, kind, and inspiring, and his guidance has helped me believe in myself and my science in a way I couldn’t have imagined even a year ago. I doubt he knows it, but Ed’s mentorship over the years has opened me up to a world of scientific possibilities that people from my background are not often exposed to, and I cannot overemphasize how grateful I am for that.”
Exceptional mentorship continues to be a cornerstone feature of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program since its inception in 2001.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes achievements 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 alumnus who has attained and maintained extraordinary impact throughout their career in their chosen fields of endeavor and in their service to society at large. The ceremony to honor the 2023 winner was held during the NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Colloquium Gala Dinner at Homerton College, at the University of Cambridge.
Prof. Jonathan Roiser is an NIH OxCam Alumni from the Class of 2003, under the joint mentorship of Prof. Barbara Sahakian (who was one of the signatories of the original doctoral program agreement between NIH and Cambridge, along with Dr. Michael Lenardo…please see archived photo below!) at the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Wayne Drevets, who was then Chief of the NIMH Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program. Jonathan was the first Scholar to graduate from the University of Cambridge arm of the Program in 2005, having joined OxCam as an Advanced Scholar part-way through his PhD, which was funded by the UK Medical Research Council. Roiser, Sahakian, and Drevets planned a highly complex psychopharmacological neuroimaging experiment to understand how serotonin modulates the brain’s processing of emotion in depression.
After graduation, Jonathan returned to London in 2005 for a post-doctoral position at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL) where he was mentored by some of the world’s leading experts in neuroimaging. Impressively, after only two years, he obtained a faculty position at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where he founded the Neuroscience and Mental Health group which he continues to direct today.
In 2013, Jonathan became the youngest ever Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator with a £1 million grant, allowing him to undertake an extensive research program focusing on motivational dysfunction in depression and novel treatments. He has become a pioneer and international leader in the biological psychiatry field, especially in the burgeoning area of computational psychiatry. He served as Section Editor at Neuroimage: Clinical for five years, before accepting a Reviewing Editor appointment at eLife in 2020 where he became a Senior Editor within a year. Jonathan has been a strong proponent of eLife’s advocacy for preprint publishing and broader attempts to reform the scientific review process.
In recognition of his achievements, Jonathan was promoted to full Professor in 2015–just one decade after graduating from the NIH OxCam Program. In 2019 he became Deputy Director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. He has received many distinguished honors and his work has been cited over 17,000 times, giving him an exceptional h-index of 70.
In addition to his profound influence on neuroscience and mental health research, Jonathan has made truly unique contributions to research training. Inspired by his own experience in the NIH OxCam Program, in 2009 he founded and continues to direct the UCL-NIMH Joint Doctoral Program in Neuroscience. Most notably, in 2019 he was awarded a £5.7 million grant from the Wellcome Trust to establish a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Mental Health Science. Jonathan is also committed to science communication and public engagement, involvement of people with lived experience in the research process, open science, and translation of science for societal benefit, clearly demonstrating impact outside his immediate network.
His nominator, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program co-founder, Dr. Michael Lenardo, remarked “In summary, Jonathan’s leadership and recognition in the field of neuroscience and mental health research is truly remarkable, with tremendous impact both scientifically and societally. He has already built an impressive legacy through his deep and enduring commitment to research training at this stage in his career. It is hard to imagine that there is a more suitable recipient for the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award, and I am delighted to nominate him with the greatest of enthusiasm.”
On learning of his Award, Jonathan commented “I could not be more thrilled to be recognized through this prestigious award. The NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program was absolutely foundational to my career, allowing me to broaden my scientific horizons in ways that continue to impact my research today. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Michael Lenardo for my nomination, and deeply honored that the committee chose to select me.”
The International Biomedical Research Alliance’s Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was created to recognizethe 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. This year, the Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was bestowed upon Dr. Kristoffer Haurum Johansen.
Kristoffer Haurum Johansen was a Wellcome Trust-NIH-Cambridge PhD Scholar in the Class of 2017, with mentors Dr. Pam Schwartzberg at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and Professor Klaus Okkenhaug at the University of Cambridge.
Kristoffer has been an exemplar, both in tackling the challenges of working across two labs on two continents and more importantly, taking full advantage of the benefits the NIH OxCam Scholars Program offers.
Kristoffer designed a CRISPR screen that targets all known and suspected PIP3-binding proteins in the genome, with one of the key target genes identified being RASA3. These are potential effectors of the PI3K pathway which not only is essential for normal immune function but also among the most frequently activated in cancer and metabolic processes. RASA3 is unique among known PIP3 effectors to be negatively regulated by PI3K. Through his PhD, he mastered techniques including bioinformatics, molecular biology, gene-editing, in vivo infection and immunization models, imaging, flow cytometry, and biochemistry. Kristoffer published his work reporting the CRISPR screen and RASA3 phenotyping in Science Signaling which was featured on the cover and was highlighted by Science. Based on his work he has won a prestigious Fellowship from the Danish Lundbeckfonden where he will apply the techniques, he learned during his PhD to engineer more effective T cells to fight cancer.
“I have had the pleasure of visiting Kristoffer’s lab in Denmark and am delighted to see him developing a career as a leading innovative and independent researcher with great support from his current mentor, Sine Reker Hadrup, a world leader in the analysis of the TCR repertoires of tumour reactive T cells. Kristoffer brought CRISPR technology to the lab and is devising very clever methods for CRISPR screening and to modify T cells for adoptive cell therapy,” remarked Prof Klaus Okkenhaug.
“Throughout his work, it was a pleasure to watch Kristoffer grow as a scientist. He is bright, hardworking, independent, and creative and thinks deeply about his work and that of others. His work has wide-ranging implications for understanding immune cell trafficking in response to immunization, infection, and cancer. Finally, I would like to comment that Kristoffer is truly a delight to work with—friendly, helpful, generous, and conscientious, with high standards. I have had multiple outstanding students in my laboratory, including Jay Debnath, now chair of Pathology at UCSF; Edward M. Schaeffer now chair of Urology at Northwestern and more recently Roseanne Zhao, now a fellow in Mike Diamond’s lab. Kris is among the best of them. It is a pleasure and an honor to have worked with him, and both Klaus Okkenhaug and I highly recommend him for this award,” stated Dr. Pam Schwartzberg.
On being honored with this award Dr. Johansen remarked “I am deeply humbled and honored to receive this award and would like to express my gratitude to the International Biomedical Research Alliance for supporting the programme. My PhD studies were greatly enriched by new friendships with my fellow students, each of whom has contributed exceptional work in their respective fields. Lastly, I would like to give a heartfelt thank you to my fantastic supervisors, Professor Klaus Okkenhaug, and Dr. Pamela L. Schwartzberg, who have supported me immensely on this journey.”
