Shaham and Chalasani named winners of 2009 Blavatnik Awards

Two Rockefeller University scientists were named winners of the third annual Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists at last night’s Science and the City Gala hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences. Associate Professor Shai Shaham, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Developmental Genetics, and Postdoctoral Fellow Sreekanth H. Chalasani, a member of Cori Bargmann’s Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior, were named finalists in the competition in September and received $10,000 and $5,000, respectively, in unrestricted funds. The award comes with an additional $15,000 for Shaham and $10,000 for Chalasani.

Shaham, who came to Rockefeller as assistant professor in 2001 and was named associate professor in 2007, uses the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study the control of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, during animal development, and the numerous functions of glial cells, which perform essential support services in the nervous system and dysfunctions in which are linked to most diseases of the brain. In addition to discovering a number of mechanisms that regulate apoptotic cell death, the Shaham lab in 2007 identified a novel, nonapoptotic cell death program that is conserved from C. elegans to vertebrates. He further pinpointed several genes involved in the new cell death program that may also be linked to certain neurodegenerative diseases.

Shaham received his Ph.D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco, before joining Rockefeller. He is a recipient of the Klingenstein Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, the Breast Cancer Alliance Masin Young Investigator Award and the Weill-Caulier Herschel Fellowship, among other honors.

Chalasani, who received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, joined the UC San Francisco laboratory of Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Cori Bargmann as a postdoctoral fellow that year, and moved with Bargmann to Rockefeller University in 2004. His research focuses on how the C. elegans nervous system responds to changes in the environment by generating behaviors that last several minutes. Chalasani has also received a Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation Fellowship.

Made possible by a grant from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists were created in 2007 to recognize highly innovative, impactful and interdisciplinary accomplishments in the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering made by young investigators working in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. A jury of 63 distinguished scientists conducted two rounds of reviews of the research achievements of each of this year’s finalists. Past recipients from Rockefeller University include Richard E. Salomon Family Professor Tom W. Muir in 2008 and Chemers Family Associate Professor Leslie B. Vosshall in 2007. Past finalists from Rockefeller have included three postdocs in 2008: Valerie Horsley, Andreas Keller and Matthew Evans; and Tarun Kapoor, head of the Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology, in 2007.

The New York Academy of Sciences is an independent, not-for-profit organization committed to advancing science, technology and society worldwide since 1817. With 24,000 members in 140 countries, NYAS is creating a global community of science for the benefit of humanity. The academy’s core mission is to advance scientific knowledge, positively impact the major global challenges of society with science-based solutions and increase the number of scientifically informed individuals in society at large.