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.
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.
