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.
LA JOLLA—Horacio Valeiras, CEO of Frontier Global Partners, has been newly appointed to the Salk Institute’s Board of Trustees. He will work alongside business and nonprofit leaders from around the world, all committed to supporting Salk’s innovative, high-quality scientific research.
LA JOLLA—A new Salk Institute study suggests estrogen-related receptors could be a key to repairing energy metabolism and muscle fatigue.
LA JOLLA—Salk Institute Professor Satchidananda Panda has been named a semifinalist in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition. Panda’s team is known for its expertise in circadian rhythms, the body’s internal timetable that determines the timing of our behaviors, such as sleep and wakefulness, and almost every bodily function.
LA JOLLA— The National Academy of Sciences recently announced that Salk Institute Professor Emeritus Greg Lemke is one of 120 new members and 30 foreign associates to be elected to the academy in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. This election is considered one of the highest honors accorded to a scientist in the United States. Lemke, a neuroscientist, is known for discovering the TAM family of cell receptors and their role in brain inflammation. His recognition brings the number of Salk faculty elected to the National Academy of Sciences to 14.
LA JOLLA—Three Salk Institute faculty members have been promoted for their notable, innovative contributions to science. Associate Professors Nicola Allen and Diana Hargreaves were promoted to full professors, and Assistant Professor Jesse Dixon was promoted to associate professor. The promotions were based on Salk faculty and nonresident fellow recommendations and approved by Salk’s president and Board of Trustees on April 4, 2025.
LA JOLLA—Industrial farming practices often deplete the soil of important nutrients and minerals, leaving farmers to rely on artificial fertilizers to support plant growth. In fact, fertilizer use has more than quadrupled since the 1960s, but this comes with serious consequences. Fertilizer production consumes massive amounts of energy, and its use pollutes the water, air, and land.
Seventy years ago, on April 12, 1955, a scientific breakthrough changed the course of public health and inspired hope worldwide. The polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and colleagues was officially declared “safe, effective, and potent”—a moment heralded as a triumph of medicine over one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century.
LA JOLLA—Richard A. Heyman, a member of the Salk Institute’s Board of Trustees, and his wife, Anne Daigle, have donated $4.5 million to establish the new Richard A. Heyman Collaborative Innovation Fund to support Institute faculty on collaborative, early-stage studies aimed at big, bold questions.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute has named Michelle Chamberlain as Vice President of External Relations. She will assume the role on April 2, 2025.
LA JOLLA—Antidepressants like Prozac are commonly prescribed to treat mental health disorders, but new research suggests they could also protect against serious infections and life-threatening sepsis. Scientists at the Salk Institute have now uncovered how the drugs are able to regulate the immune system and defend against infectious disease—insights that could lead to a new generation of life-saving treatments and enhance global preparedness for future pandemics.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute is proud to celebrate Professor Tony Hunter’s 50 years as a cancer biology pioneer whose fundamental discoveries have inspired the development of more than 80 cancer drugs. Since joining the Institute’s faculty in February 1975, Hunter has been a cornerstone of the Salk community, contributing to transformational discoveries and mentoring more than 100 trainees, many of whom have also become scientific leaders.
LA JOLLA—About one in eight adults in the United States has tried or currently uses a GLP-1 medication, and a quarter of those users cite weight loss as their main goal. But weight loss doesn’t discriminate between fat and muscle. Patients using GLP-1 drugs can experience rapid and substantial muscle loss, accounting for as much as 40% of their total weight loss. So how can we lose weight without also losing critical muscle?
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute today announced the appointment of Fred Luddy, founder of ServiceNow, to its Board of Trustees.
LA JOLLA—The Salk Institute has named plant geneticist Detlef Weigel a Nonresident Fellow, making him a member of the group of eminent scientific advisors who guide the Institute’s leadership. Weigel is a director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen in Germany, as well as an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute and University of Tübingen.
LA JOLLA—Immunotherapy is a modern approach to cancer treatment that uses a patient’s own immune system to help fight tumors. It has made an incredible impact on treating cancers in many different organ systems, including the lung, kidney, and bladder—but for other cancers, such as liver cancer, the therapy has been much less effective. This discrepancy is especially concerning as liver cancer rates have nearly tripled in the last 40 years.
LA JOLLA—Like all cancers, bladder cancer develops when abnormal cells start to multiply out of control. But what if we could put a lid on their growth?
LA JOLLA—Plants may burrow into the ground and stretch toward the sun, but they’re ultimately stuck where they sprout—at the mercy of environmental threats like temperature, drought, and microbial infection. To compensate for their inability to up and move when danger strikes, many plants have evolved ways to protect themselves by altering their physiology, such as building armor around parts of their body and roots called the periderm. However, since many plant biologists who study tissue development look at young plants, later-in-life periderm development has remained relatively unexplored.
LA JOLLA—Human bodies defend themselves using a diverse population of immune cells that circulate from one organ to another, responding to everything from cuts to colds to cancer. But plants don’t have this luxury. Because plant cells are immobile, each individual cell is forced to manage its own immunity in addition to its many other responsibilities, like turning sunlight into energy or using that energy to grow. How these multitasking cells accomplish it all—detecting threats, communicating those threats, and responding effectively—has remained unclear.
LA JOLLA—The decision between scrambled eggs or an apple for breakfast probably won’t make or break your day. However, for your cells, a decision between similar microscopic nutrients could determine their entire identity. If and how nutrient preference impacts cell identity has been a longstanding mystery for scientists—until a team of Salk Institute immunologists revealed a novel framework for the complicated relationship between nutrition and cell identity.
