An Israeli-American researcher has won a prestigious annual international science award for his work in sequencing and analyzing the genomes of individual brain cells.
Dr. Gilad Evrony, 34, was awarded the Eppendorf and Science Prize for Neurobiology presented by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.
The Jerusalem native and Harvard Medical School graduate worked with colleagues in the laboratory of Christopher Walsh at Boston Children's Hospital to develop a way to detect mutations during brain development, which could cause neurologic disease, by sequencing the genomes of single brain cells.
The Eppendorf and Science Prize in Neurobiology recognizes outstanding international neurobiological research based on current methods and advances in the field of molecular and cell biology by a young scientist early in his or her career, as described in a 1,000-word essay based on experiments performed within the last three years. The grand prize winner receives $25,000 from Eppendorf.
Evrony's award-winning essay, "One brain, many genomes," was published in the Nov. 4 issue of Science.
"As a physician-scientist, I wanted to pursue research that could help patients with diseases whose causes are not known," said Evrony, who is working in a pediatrics residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "I hope our findings inspire more research to bring light to unsolved neurologic diseases."
Evrony studied in the United States after serving in the Israel Defense Forces.