Biomedical Research News

Four physician-scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons have been named 2023 Gerstner Scholars and will receive funding for up to three years to support their research. In addition, one 2020 Gerstner Scholar will receive the highly coveted Gerstner Merit Award. The Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Scholars Program was established 15 years ago to provide exceptionally talented physician-scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) with critical funding. This generous support allows early-career scientists to conduct high-risk, high-reward research and gather the pilot data necessary to apply for grants from the National Institutes of Health and other sources. The Gerstner Scholars Program is a model faculty development program for researchers across the continuum at VP&S, providing the foundations to build biomedical research careers. The physician-scientists named as 2023 Gerstner Scholars: Shah Ali, MD Edmond Chan, MD Pamela Good, MD Juan-Manuel Schvartzman, MD, PhD Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, a 2020 Gerstner Scholar, has been awarded the Gerstner Merit Award. In 2014, the Gerstner Family Foundation created the Gerstner Merit Award to provide an additional year of funding for a Gerstner Scholar in his or her third year who has made remarkable strides in research and demonstrated extraordinary growth as an academic biomedical investigator.

Gerstner Philanthropies is excited to announce that the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core, part of the American Museum of Natural History’s new addition, the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, will open to the public on May 4, 2023. This addition will create more than 30 connections among 10 of the Museum’s buildings to improve visitor circulation on campus, and will feature all new exhibition galleries, learning labs and collections facilities. The Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core will display over 3,000 objects from the Museum’s research collections and will span across three levels. The Collections Core is designed to showcase the importance of scientific collections as the bedrock on which scientific discoveries stand. The glass panels of the Collections Core will give visitors the opportunity to view scientists in-action working with the specimens on display. Along with the Collections Core, the Gilder Center will also include an all-new insectarium, with the world’s largest live leafcutter ant display, as well as a live butterfly vivarium. “The Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation is a glorious new facility that fulfills a critical need at a critical time: to help visitors to understand the natural world more deeply, to appreciate that all life is interdependent, to trust science, and to be inspired to protect our precious planet and its myriad life forms,” said Ellen Futter, President Emerita of the American Museum of Natural History.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) have invented a new RNA sequencing method that achieves high-quality results from small volumes of frozen tumor specimens. They demonstrated the success of their technique in two clinical studies that profiled dozens of tumor samples, both those archived and those freshly collected, to understand how they respond to anti-tumor therapy.

A new study from Gerstner Scholar Jesse Delia and researchers at the AMNH identified the mechanism that allows Glass frogs to maintain their unique transparency. Researchers had previously observed Glass frogs shifting into a transparent state during rest periods as a means to camouflage themselves. By using soundwaves to identify where the Glass frogs were storing their red blood cells, Delia and his colleagues observed the Glass frogs storing up to 89% of their red blood cells within the liver. This ability, and the fact that the Glass frogs did not develop any bloods clots could have potentially large benefits for blood-clotting treatment in humans.

Paige Arnold, who will graduate from the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSK) next spring, has been awarded the 2022 Chairman’s Prize. The competitive award is presented annually and was established by GSK’s Board of Trustees Chair Emeritus Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., for whom the school is named. This year’s Chairman’s Prize, in the amount of $2,000, honors Arnold’s research, which she conducted in the laboratory of Lydia Finley, Assistant Professor of Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI). The Finley Lab studies how metabolic pathways regulate stem cells and cancer cells. Arnold’s work focuses on the characterization of a novel, alternative tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle that is a major driver of the metabolic diversity observed across mammalian cells. Her research sought to understand how this metabolic diversity is achieved, and whether it is important for the establishment of cell identity.