Kudos

Six NIHers Receive PECASE Honors

On January 14, 2025, six principal investigators from the NIH Intramural Research Program received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. The recipients are:

• Benedict Anchang (NIEHS), who studies how receptors inside and outside cells are affected by drugs, endocrine disruptors, viruses, and environmental chemicals/agents.
• Sadhana Jackson (NINDS), who studies focus on the role of the blood–brain barrier in aggressive brain cancers in both children and young adults, aiming to understand the relationship between how drugs enter the brain and how patients respond to treatment.
• Yogen Kanthi (NHLBI), who investigates how inflammation and blood clotting contribute to vascular disease.
• Sonja Scholz (NINDS), who explores how heritable factors are involved in the development of neurological diseases.
• Nirali Shah (NCI), whose research focuses on translation of immunotherapy approaches to treat high-risk blood cancers in children, adolescents, and young adults.
• Hugo Tejeda (NIMH), who hopes to shed light on how the brain utilizes neuromodulation in motivational and emotional neural circuits to process information and orchestrate behavior.

These investigators represent the PECASE cohorts of 2018–2020, the most recently recognized by the White House. For the long, impressive list of NIH PECASE recipients dating back to 1997.

…And One More Selected As a Presidential Leadership Scholar 

Paule Valery Joseph, a Lasker Clinical Research Scholar in NIAAA with a joint appointment in NIDCD, has been selected for the 2025 class of Presidential Leadership Scholars. Now in its tenth year, the program invites mid-career professionals to learn leadership skills from former presidents, key administration officials, leading academics, and business and civic leaders. Joseph is chief of the NIAAA Section of Sensory Science and Metabolism and co-directs the newly established NIDCD National Smell and Taste Center (external link). She conducts preclinical, clinical, and translational studies to improve the diagnosis, prevention, and management of chemosensory disorders and, more recently, loss of smell and taste post COVID infection.