Howard Hughes Medical Institute 2009 Annual Report

Bonnie Bassler, an HHMI investigator at Princeton University, won the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences for 2009. This annual $35,000 prize, awarded by the Wiley Foundation, recognizes Bassler for her studies on how bacteria communicate with one another using a chemical language.

Kevin P. Campbell, an HHMI investigator at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, and Louis M. Kunkel, an HHMI investigator at Children’s Hospital Boston, received the 2009 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. They were chosen to share the $250,000 prize for their research on unraveling the molecular mechanisms of muscular dystrophies.

The Heinz Family Philanthropies honored HHMI investigator Joseph L. DeRisi of the University of California, San Francisco, with a 2008 Heinz Award of $250,000 for his breakthroughs in viral detection in malaria and other infectious diseases. The Heinz Awards recognize outstanding individuals in five categories—the arts and humanities; the environment; the human condition; public policy; and technology, the economy, and employment
—and honor the late U.S. Senator John Heinz.

The 2009 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine was awarded to HHMI investigator Jeffrey M. Friedman of The Rockefeller University for his research on leptin, a hormone that regulates food intake and body weight. He shares the $1 million prize with Douglas L. Coleman of The Jackson Laboratory.

Richard M. Losick, an HHMI professor at Harvard University, and Peter Walter, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, San Francisco, are recipients of the 2009 Gairdner International Awards from the Gairdner Foundation. These prestigious annual awards, for CAD$100,000, honor outstanding discoveries and contributions to medical science. Losick studies differentiation, morphogenesis, and multicellularity in the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Walter researches how cells regulate protein folding.