Announcements: Kudos

FOUR NIHERS ELECTED TO THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE IN 2022

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the election of 90 regular members and 10 international members during its annual meeting in October 2022. Four are from NIH: Carlos Blanco, Eugene V. Koonin, Bruce J. Tromberg, and Jennifer Webster-Cyriaque.

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the election of 90 regular members and 10 international members during its annual meeting in October 2022. Four are from NIH.

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

The newly elected NIHers members of the National Academy of Medicine and their election citations are:

Carlos Blanco, M.D., Ph.D. (Director, Division of Epidemiology, Services, and Prevention Research, National Institute on Drug Abuse. “For his pioneering work on the development of treatment and preventive interventions for substance-use disorders that has shaped national thinking and guided over $3 billion in National Institutes of Health-supported research on the opioid epidemic, justice-involved populations, pain and addiction, cannabis legalization, and vaping.”

Eugene V. Koonin. Ph.D. (NIH Distinguished Investigator and Evolutionary Genomics Group Leader, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine) “For his work on the identification of clusters of homologous genes that created the foundation for systematic study of genome evolution and function; his work illuminated the evolution of microbes and viruses including discovery of adaptive immunity in bacteria and archaea, the basis for the genome editing technology known as CRISPR.”

Bruce J. Tromberg, Ph.D. (Director, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering) “For his leadership in biomedical engineering and the NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology (RADx Tech) initiative. He helped guide the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic by engaging government, academia, and the R&D innovation/entrepreneurship community to increase SARS-COV-2 test capacity and performance in home, point-of-care, and lab settings at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact.”

Jennifer Webster-Cyriaque, D.D.S., Ph.D. (Deputy Director, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and Laboratory Chief, Viral Oral Infections in Immunosuppression and Cancer, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) “For making seminal contributions to our understanding of the role of virus-host interaction in oral disease. Most notably, she showed that oral Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) permissive infection was a lytic and transforming infection. Her paradigm-shifting work described oral Kaposi’s sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV) replication and oral iatrogenic Kaposi’s development.”