Three Institutional Scientists Receive Presidential Award

Three Weill Cornell Medicine scientists were honored this week with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the U.S. government’s highest commendation for outstanding early-career scientists and engineers.

Drs. Steven Josefowicz, Ekta Khurana and Kristen Pleil were among 400 early-career scientists and engineers to receive the award, announced Jan. 14 by the White House.

The award, known as PECASE, was established in 1996 by President Bill Clinton to recognize early-career scientists and engineers who show exceptional leadership potential. It recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology; expands awareness of careers in science and engineering; recognizes the scientific missions of participating agencies; enhances connections between research and impacts on society; and highlights the importance of science and technology for the nation’s future, according to the White House’s news release.

“We are so thrilled for Drs. Josefowicz, Khurana and Pleil, and offer them our congratulations for this most-deserved accolade,” said Dr. Robert A. Harrington, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medicine. “They and their teams have advanced their fields of study through achievements in scholarship and innovative research. Each are outstanding examples of our talented and distinguished faculty body here at Weill Cornell.”

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Dr. Steven Josefowicz

Dr. Josefowicz is an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine. His research focuses on understanding how large genomes in complex organisms are regulated at the epigenetic level to direct development and rapid environmental responses, and how aberrant regulation leads to disease. In one such study, Dr. Josefowicz and his collaborators revealed how severe COVID-19 triggered changes in DNA packaging that cause long-lasting alterations in the body’s immune response. The findings could explain why some people experience prolonged inflammation and “long COVID” after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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Dr. Ekta Khurana

Dr. Khurana is the WorldQuant Foundation Research Scholar, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics, co-leader of the cancer genetics and epigenetics program at the Meyer Cancer Center, and a member of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Khurana’s lab is developing novel approaches that integrate genomics, computational biology and systems biology to understand how differences in individual genomes impact human disease. She and her colleagues recently discovered and defined a relatively common, stem-cell like subtype of hormone therapy-resistant prostate cancer. Her lab has pioneered new computational approaches to understand the role of non-protein-coding regions in cancer. Another computational approach from her lab, called Cancer Regulatory Networks and Susceptibilities, may help discover key proteins that would make good drug targets for cancer therapy.

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Dr. Kristen Pleil

Dr. Pleil is an associate professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine. She investigates in mice how sex and stress hormones regulate how the brain controls the consumption of alcohol and illicit substances, as well as other stress and neuropsychiatric disease-related behaviors. In one recent study, Dr. Pleil and her team revealed that the hormone estrogen promotes binge alcohol drinking in females, causing them to consume large quantities of alcohol, especially in the first 30 minutes after it’s offered. This discovery built on an earlier study from her lab that found that a subpopulation of neurons in the brain that increase alcohol drinking were more excitable in female mice than in males, and this study showed that estrogen made in the ovaries acts upon those neurons to increase their activity and have a pro-drinking effect in females.