Brielle Ferguson (Assistant Professor of Genetics and Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital) and SueYeon Chung (Assistant Professor of Physics and of Applied Mathematics) named 2026 McKnight Scholars.

Vanessa Frelih ’26 (Neuroscience) Wins Glushko Prize for Research on Cognitive Flexibility and Aging.

Sandhya Kumar ‘26 (MCB and Statistics) received the Hoopes and Henderson Prizes for her thesis, “Enteric Neurons Rapidly Prime Systemic Immunity in Response to Mucosal Infection,” supervised and nominated by Dr. Ruaidhri Jackson.

Anne Liang ‘26 (MCB) received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for her thesis, “Molecular and Functional Characterization of Lipid Droplets in Neuronal Development and Degeneration,” supervised and nominated by Professor Jeeyun Chung.

Mira Hu Jiang ‘26 (Neuroscience) received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for her thesis “Disrupted Dialogues: Microbial and Hormonal Influences on Enteric Neurons in Disorders of Gut-Brain Interaction,” under the nomination of Professor Meenakshi Rao at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Sean Meng ‘26 (Neuroscience) received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for his thesis: “Rewired by Time: a Dopaminergic Account of Cognitive Flexibility Across the Mouse Lifespan,” under the supervision and nomination of Dr. Bernardo Sabatini nominator and mentor Dr. Kevin Mastro.

Judith Steen, Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, won the 2026 Tony Pawson Clinical Proteomics Award, presented during the Canadian National Proteomics Network meeting in Quebec City.

Clifford Woolf, Professor of Neurobiology and Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the FM Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.

HBI co-director David Ginty, together with Patrik Ernfors of the Karolinska Institute, was presented the 2026 Brain Prize by the Lundbeck Foundation last week. A short film released at the prize ceremony provides a portrait of both scientists and their perspectives on the science of touch and pain.

Constance Cepko, Bullard Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, received 2026 Laureate Award from the Future Vision Foundation.

Neuroscience concentrator Kathryn Nairn awarded the John Dowling Prize for Neuroscience Senior Thesis.

Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, has been named a Harvard College Professor by The Faculty of Arts and Sciences.