SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — Fourteen San Diego researchers will each receive $500,000 grants as part of a new “heroes” award by the Prebys Foundation, the local charity created by philanthropist Conrad Prebys.
Spread across multiple institutions, the $7 million allocation provides two years of to those doing ground-breaking medical research. The initiative “seeks to address the critical gap in women and underrepresented groups in leading research positions by offering substantial funding to researchers for projects that might otherwise go uned,” according to a statement about the program.
The foundation made its choices after consulting with the Science Philanthropy Alliance and the consultancy Open Impact to create the heroes program and select the first group of awardees.
Prebys Research Heroes and their avenues of investigation are:
Rachel Blaser, University of San Diego, will explore “how healthy aging adults perform on tasks that test their perception of space and their problem-solving abilities,” work that may lead to “early detection methods for cognitive decline, which could transform how we approach diseases like Alzheimer’s.”
Dannielle Engle, Salk Institute, and her team “are working to find a way to easily and quickly diagnose pancreatic cancer, using a test similar to the PSA test for prostate cancer or colon cancer screenings.”
Stephanie Fraley, UC San Diego School of Medicine, “is tackling two major challenges facing human health today: advancing infectious disease detection technologies and identifying therapeutic targets for cancer metastasis, two conditions that for a significant proportion of deaths globally.”
Mia Huang, Scripps Research, “aims to impact pregnancy health risks like preeclampsia — a common, yet poorly understood pregnancy disorder — and seeking markers that could predict complications long before they occur.”
Xin Jin, Scripps Research, “is working on approaches to understanding the cellular underpinnings and fundamental principles of brain development, which will allow us to understand how diseases like autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia, among others, progress.”
Razel Bacuetes Milo, University of San Diego, “is a practicing family nurse practitioner and behavioral science researcher, studying the relationship between perceived well-being and stress among the Filipino community as a way of gaining insight into how to improve health outcomes.”
Marygorret Obonyo, UC San Diego School of Medicine, “is studying novel ways to identify genes that increase the risk of gastric cancer and treatments that could be effective before the cancer reaches the terminal stage.”
Angelica Riestra, San Diego State University, “aims to find novel ways to help counteract the disproportionate impact of trichomoniasis.” Riestra is also involved in efforts to promote student success and retention in STEM fields and biomedical research.”
Erica Ollmann Saphire, president, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, “studies the molecular relationships between pathogens and their hosts, learning about where viruses interact with the immune system and where they are vulnerable to being neutralized.”
Sonia Sharma, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, “is particularly interested in how molecules in the blood can activate the brain’s immune system as a way to design treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.”
Tatyana Sharpee, Salk Institute, “is working on potentially groundbreaking research that … is profoundly interdisciplinary, drawing on physics, mathematics, neuroscience, molecular biology, hyperbolic geometry, and even cosmology to help scientists better unlock the mysteries of the brain.”
Sujan Shresta, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, will focus “on protecting the public against several medically relevant viruses, including dengue, Zika, West Nile, Powassan, and other pathogens that manipulate human immune cells and which have the potential to cause long-term neurological issues such as brain fog and potentially even dementia.”
Lisa Stowers, Scripps Research, “focuses on learning more about how the brain works in order to develop medications and therapies to treat a wide variety of brain-related disorders, from depression to dementia.”
Daniela Valdez-Jasso, UC San Diego School of Medicine, “focuses on identifying markers for diagnosis before it’s too late, understanding how the disease progresses, and identifying opportunities for developing new drugs to treat the disease.”
More information on each researcher’s work, and on the heroes program, is available at PrebysResearchHeroes.org.
