Four UC San Francisco researchers are among the 84 Faculty Scholars named Thursday by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Simons Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a new program to support promising early-career scientists.
The four UCSF researchers are Edward Chang, MD, professor of neurological surgery in the School of Medicine; Michael Fischbach, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering in the School of Pharmacy; Adam Frost, MD, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the School of Medicine; and Markus Muschen, MD, PhD, professor of laboratory medicine at the School of Medicine and co-leader of the Hematopoietic Malignancies Program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Chang, Frost, and Müschen are HHMI Faculty Scholars, and Fischbach is an HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar.
The philanthropies will spend $83 million on the first cohort of Faculty Scholars through five-year grants that range from $600,000 to $1.8 million. The Faculty Scholars are early-career researchers with five to 10 years of faculty experience selected for their potential for significant research productivity and originality.
“Support for outstanding early-career scientists is essential for continued progress in science in future years,” said Marian Carlson, Director of Life Sciences at the Simons Foundation, in a press release.