2021 Banners JamesPrize
Allon Klein, Harvard Medical School, and Aviv Regev, Genentech Research and Early Development, will receive the inaugural James Prize in Science and Technology Integration.
Klein and Regev are known for their advancement of molecular biology, engineering, statistics and computer science, and their integrated use in research. Their simultaneous endeavors have resulted in far-reaching acceptance and application of massively-parallel single-cell genomics to investigate the gene expression profiles that define, on an individual cell level, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states.
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. This work was done while at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT.
The James Prize in Science and Technology Integration is presented annually and carries with it a $50,000 prize. The prize honors outstanding contributions made by researchers who are able to adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields, and thus integrate 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. The prize was established in 2020 by Robert James.
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