Two Rockefeller scientists named finalists for Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists

Two Rockefeller scientists — Associate Professor and head of laboratory Shai Shaham and Postdoctoral Fellow Sreekanth H. Chalasani — have been named finalists in the third annual Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists competition. Established by the New York Academy of Sciences and the Blavatnik Charitable Foundation to recognize the contributions of young scientists and engineers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the program awards finalists with grants between $5,000 and $10,000. The winners in each category, to be announced in November, will receive an additional $10,000 to $15,000 respectively.

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 of the nervous system, 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. The lab further identified 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, a Breast Cancer Alliance Masin Young Investigator Award and a 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.

This year’s 12 finalists — including eight faculty and four postdocs from the Tri-state area — are selected for exceptionally elegant, innovative and significant interdisciplinary research projects in life sciences, physical sciences and engineering. The finalists will be honored and the winners announced at the New York Academy of Sciences’ sixth annual Science and the City Gala on November 16.

Previous Blavatnik Awards went to Leslie B. Vosshall, HHMI investigator and head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, in 2007, and Tom W. Muir, head of the Selma and Lawrence Ruben Laboratory of Synthetic Protein Chemistry, in 2008. Past finalists from Rockefeller have included Tarun Kapoor, head of the Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology, in 2007, and three postdocs in 2008: Valerie Horsley, Andreas Keller and Matthew Evans.