LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute will welcome plant biologist Lucia Strader as a new professor and holder of the Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman Chair in Plant Biology in October 2025. Strader is an internationally recognized leader in plant hormone biology who was previously based at Duke University.
LA JOLLA—Nearly everything you know about plants was first discovered in a plant you’ve likely never heard of. Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, is a small, flowering weed that has shaped much of plant biology as we know it. Serving as the representative plant species in most plant research across the last half century, Arabidopsis has taught us how plants respond to light, which hormones control plant behavior, and why some plants grow long, deep roots while others grow them shallow and wide. But despite its beloved reputation among plant biologists worldwide, many elements of the Arabidopsis life cycle have remained a mystery.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute will welcome immunologist Jamie Blum as a NOMIS Assistant Professor in September 2025. Blum investigates how the immune system interprets what we eat—specifically, why some foods trigger harmful allergic responses while others are accepted as safe.
LA JOLLA—The obesity rate has more than doubled in the last 30 years, affecting more than one billion people worldwide. This prevalent condition is also linked to other metabolic disorders, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and cancers. Current treatment options include lifestyle interventions, bariatric surgery, and GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, but many patients struggle to access or complete these treatments or to maintain their weight loss afterwards.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute has appointed Brenda Schulman as a Nonresident Fellow, joining a group of eminent scientific advisors who provide strategic advice to the Institute’s leadership. Schulman is a professor and the director of the Molecular Machines and Signaling Department at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute announces a landmark partnership with luxury skincare brand La Mer. Through the new La Mer Fellowship in Healthy Aging, the company will fund a three-year postdoctoral position focused on foundational research on human aging at the molecular level.
LA JOLLA—Proteins sustain life as we know it, serving many important structural and functional roles throughout the body. But these large molecules have cast a long shadow over a smaller subclass of proteins called microproteins. Microproteins have been lost in the 99% of DNA disregarded as “noncoding”—hiding in vast, dark stretches of unexplored genetic code. But despite being small and elusive, their impact may be just as big as larger proteins.
LA JOLLA—Of the 3.6 million babies born in the United States each year, around 80 percent begin breastfeeding in their first month of life. Breastfeeding has known benefits for both mother and child, reducing maternal risk of breast and ovarian cancers, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure, while simultaneously supporting the baby’s nutrition and immune system. But because pregnancy and lactation have been historically understudied, we still don’t understand the science behind many of these benefits.
LA JOLLA—Salk Institute Professor Diana Hargreaves was named a 2025 All-Star Translational Award Program grantee by the V Foundation for Cancer Research. The award comes as a recognition of Hargreaves’ exceptional success with her previous V Foundation grant in 2016, which aimed to identify better drug targets for cancers with mutations in a multi-protein complex called SWI/SNF that regulates DNA structure and stability. She and her collaborator, Gregory Botta, an associate professor at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, will receive $1 million to advance her new project to improve immunotherapy—a treatment that utilizes the body’s own immune cells to fight cancer—in patients with pancreatic cancer.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute announced today the appointment of Marie Carter-Dubois to serve as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective September 1, 2025.
LA JOLLA—Pain isn’t just a physical sensation—it also carries emotional weight. That distress, anguish, and anxiety can turn a fleeting injury into long-term suffering.
LA JOLLA—Salk Institute Professor Wolfgang Busch, director of the Harnessing Plants Initiative and Hess Chair in Plant Science at Salk, has received a 2025 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award. The NOMIS Foundation bestows this honor to “exceptional scientists and scholars whose innovative ideas and approaches involve interdisciplinary collaboration and apply a broad range of methods, building bridges across the boundaries of the sciences and humanities.”
LA JOLLA—Salk Assistant Professor Deepshika Ramanan has been named a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar, a distinction given to early-career leaders in the biomedical sciences whose research holds exceptional promise for revealing new pathways to advance human health.
LA JOLLA—Donald Cohn, San Diego real estate developer and community builder, died May 2, 2025, in La Jolla, California, at the age of 93. A generous supporter of the arts, education, and science, he served on the Salk Institute’s Board of Trustees from 2014 to 2022.
LA JOLLA—Tickets are now available for the 29th annual Symphony at Salk, an evening where music, science, and philanthropy converge for a spectacular celebration. Set against the backdrop of the Salk Institute’s iconic architecture, this exclusive event will take place on Saturday, August 16, 2025, and feature the San Diego Symphony performing with Emmy and Tony Award-winning performer Kristin Chenoweth.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute will receive a generous gift from the Prebys Foundation as part of a rapid-response funding initiative to safeguard San Diego’s biomedical research ecosystem. This funding will support three years of Salk’s five cornerstone education pipeline and training programs: the Heithoff-Brody High School Summer Scholars, Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), Salk Edge Program, Discover Symposium, and Rising Stars Symposium.
LA JOLLA—Cannabis has been a globally important crop for millennia. While best known today as marijuana for its psychoactive cannabinoid THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), historically, cannabis has been a cornerstone of human civilization, providing seed oil, textiles, and food for more than 10,000 years. Today, cannabis remains an understudied and underutilized resource, but United States legislation passed in 2014 and 2018 have re-energized cannabis crop development for medicinal, grain, and fiber applications.
LA JOLLA—Our cells rely on microscopic highways and specialized protein vehicles to move everything—from positioning organelles to carting protein instructions to disposing of cellular garbage. These highways (called microtubules) and vehicles (called motor proteins) are indispensable to cellular function and survival.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute welcomes two new Nonresident Fellows, UC San Francisco Professor David Julius and Stanford Professor Stephen Quake. The two scientists join a group of eminent scientific advisors who guide Salk’s leadership.
LA JOLLA—Salk Professor Terrence Sejnowski, head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and holder of the Francis Crick Chair, has been elected to the Royal Society and the American Philosophical Society. These prestigious elections recognize his outstanding leadership and extraordinary achievement in computational neuroscience.
