Indian-American Humsa Venkatesh is among the six Harvard Medical School researchers who have received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award
The award supports unusually innovative research from early-career investigators within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency who have not yet received an NIH R01 or equivalent grant.
Humsa Venkatesh is an HMS assistant professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s, whose research studies the electrical components of tumour pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which neural activity controls and facilitates disease progression.
Her research studies the electrical components of tumour pathophysiology and highlights the extent to which neural activity controls and facilitates disease progression. The understanding of these co-opting mechanisms has led to novel strategies to broadly treat cancers, by disabling their ability to electrically integrate into neural circuitry. Her pioneering research in this emerging field of cancer neuroscience aims to harness the systems-level microenvironmental dependencies of tumour growth to develop innovative treatments.
Humsa received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Biology from the University of California, Berkeley and her PhD in Cancer Biology from Stanford University. After completing her postdoctoral work, she joined the Stanford faculty in 2019 and has now started her Cancer Neuroscience research program as an Assistant Professor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
She has been recognized by the MIT Technology Review as a Pioneer Under 35 ‘TR35’ (2018), by Genetic Engineering News as a ‘Top 10 innovator to watch under 40’ (2019), and won the Science & SciLife Prize for Young Scientists (2019).
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