Emily Balskus is 2018 Blavatnik National Award finalist

May 30, 2018
Emily Balskus

Thirty-one finalists will compete for the world’s largest unrestricted prize for early career scientists

 

 

Each year, three early career scholars earn $250,000 in the categories of Life Sciences, Chemistry, and Physical Sciences & Engineering. Finalists were selected from 286 outstanding faculty-rank researchers nominated by 146 institutions across 42 states

“We created the Blavatnik Awards to identify the brightest young minds in science early in their scientific careers,” said Len Blavatnik, head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation and member of the President’s Council of the New York Academy of Sciences. “These 31 Finalists, through their creative, cutting-edge research, have demonstrated great promise for future discoveries of enormous scientific importance.”

Emily Balskus, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, investigates gut microbial metabolism and its links to human health and disease. She is also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a Faculty Associate of the Microbial Sciences Initiative at Harvard, a member of the Harvard Digestive Diseases Center, and a member of the MIT Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics.

Balskus' independent research has already been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2011 Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the 2012 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the 2013 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. She was selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2014 and in 2016 was named an HHMI-Gates Faculty Scholar.

See the Blavatnik Foundation's full press release