LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute welcomes two new Nonresident Fellows, UC Berkeley professor Andrew Dillin, PhD, and UC San Diego professor Christopher Glass, MD, PhD. The two scientists join a group of eminent scientific advisors who guide Salk’s leadership.
LA JOLLA—The COVID-19 pandemic gave us tremendous perspective on how wildly symptoms and outcomes can vary between patients experiencing the same infection. How can two people infected by the same pathogen have such different responses?
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute mourns the passing of Harvey P. White (1934–2025), a distinguished leader, philanthropist, and dedicated supporter of the Institute. White died on December 18, 2025, at the age of 91.
LA JOLLA—As soon as you are wounded—whether from grabbing a hot pan or contracting the flu—you begin a unique journey through variable symptoms toward either recovery or death. This journey is called your disease trajectory, and it varies from person to person based on history, sex, age, and many other factors. Salk scientist Janelle Ayres, PhD, has spent decades unraveling the ways the body directs this journey—why some get sick and die while others go unscathed, and what sorts of methods could be used to shift trajectories of disease and death to ones of health and survival.
LA JOLLA—Dealing with an infection isn’t as straightforward as simply killing the pathogen. The body also needs to carefully steer and monitor its immune response to prevent collateral damage. This regulation, called disease tolerance, is crucial to protecting our tissues while the immune system tackles the infection head-on.
LA JOLLA—Young minds are easily molded. Each new experience rewires a child’s brain circuitry, adding and removing synaptic connections between neurons. These wiring patterns become more stable with age, but biology has left some wiggle room to ensure that adult brains can still adapt and refine their circuitry as needed. This flexibility is called neuroplasticity, and our ability to learn, make new memories, and recover from injury all depend on it.
LA JOLLA—Physician, inventor, and venture capitalist Andrew “Drew” Senyei, MD, has been newly appointed to the Salk Institute’s Board of Trustees. He will work alongside business and nonprofit leaders from around the world to advance Salk’s foundational and innovative biology research.
LA JOLLA—All the cells in an organism have the exact same genetic sequence. What differs across cell types is their epigenetics—meticulously placed chemical tags that influence which genes are expressed in each cell. Mistakes or failures in epigenetic regulation can lead to severe developmental defects in plants and animals alike. This creates a puzzling question: If epigenetic changes regulate our genetics, what is regulating them?
LA JOLLA—Salk faculty members Joseph Ecker, PhD, Ronald Evans, PhD, Rusty Gage, PhD, Christian Metallo, PhD, Satchidananda Panda, PhD, Reuben Shaw, PhD, and Kay Tye, PhD, as well as research assistant Joseph Nery have all been named in this year’s Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate. The 2025 list includes 6,868 researchers from 60 countries who have demonstrated “significant and broad influence in their fields of research.”
LA JOLLA—Seagrasses preserve our oceans, offering safe harbor for sea life, calming rough waters, and storing excess carbon dioxide. Dozens of seagrass species protect coastlines around the globe, including the common North American eelgrass, Zostera marina. But these beneficial underwater meadows are under threat from boating, dredging, disease, and extreme weather. Restoration efforts that simply replant more eelgrasses fail around half the time—so, what now?
LA JOLLA—The rate of HIV infection continues to climb globally. Around 40 million people live with HIV-1, the most common HIV strain. While symptoms can now be better managed with lifelong treatment, there is no cure to fully eliminate the virus from the body, so patients still often struggle with related health issues, side effects, social stigma, and drug resistance.
LA JOLLA—The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has selected Salk neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, PhD, to receive a 2025 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. The prestigious award is given to scientists proposing exceptionally creative high-risk, high-reward research.
LA JOLLA—Joseph Ecker, PhD, has been awarded the 2026 Barbara McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies from the Maize Genetics Cooperation, a global organization of maize geneticists and breeders. The prize honors “the most outstanding plant scientists working on both genetics and genomics in the present era.” It is named after distinguished plant biologist Barbara McClintock, whose work in maize genetics earned her the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
LA JOLLA—Deepshika Ramanan, PhD, a scientist and assistant professor at the Salk Institute, has been awarded a New Innovators Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The five-year, $1.5 million grant will support Ramanan’s pioneering research on maternal immunity during pregnancy and lactation.
LA JOLLA—After nine months in the womb, humans enter a world filled with texture and shape. We must then quickly learn to recognize and respond to textures and objects in the outside world, beginning with sensations like the soft feel of a t-shirt or the doughy squish of a sandwich. By learning what touch sensations are innocuous, the brain can better recognize painful insults that might cause damage—think skinning a knee or stubbing a toe. But 7 to 10 percent of the global population develops mechanical allodynia, a form of chronic pain where innocuous light touch is perceived as painful.
LA JOLLA—Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers, and its incidence is climbing. Because it is typically asymptomatic at early stages, pancreatic cancer is especially difficult to catch and treat in time. This allows the cancer to spread or metastasize throughout the body—the ultimate cause of death for nearly all patients.
LA JOLLA — Malnutrition is responsible for more than half of all deaths in children under the age of five worldwide. Those who survive can still experience lifelong consequences like cognitive and developmental delays, impaired academic performance, economic instability, and negative maternal health outcomes. This enormous public health issue demands solutions. The latest studies point to gut microbiome—the diverse bacteria, viruses, and other microbes living in our intestines—as a great place to start.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute mourns the loss of molecular biologist and Nobel laureate David Baltimore, a former research associate and longtime nonresident fellow at the Institute. Baltimore died on September 6, 2025, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the age of 87.
LA JOLLA—A plant’s number one priority is to grow—a feat that demands sunlight, nutrients, and water. If just one of these three inputs is missing, like water in a drought, growth halts. You might then think that at the end of that drought, the plant would jump right back into growing. Instead, its priorities shift.
LA JOLLA—Like bees breathing life into gardens, providing pollen and making flowers blossom, little cellular machines called mitochondria breathe life into our bodies, buzzing with energy as they produce the fuel that powers each of our cells. Maintaining mitochondrial metabolism requires input from many molecules and proteins—some of which have yet to be discovered.
