The Pew Charitable Trusts has announced the 2021 class of scholars and fellows of three biomedical research programs.

Thirty-seven early-career scientists will receive multiyear grants in support of their work, which ranges from exploring the genetic evolution of cancer cells to studying how molecular and neural circuits guide animals' seasonal rhythms. Researchers include twenty-two junior faculty selected to join the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences and receive funding over the next four years, such as Alaji Bai (SUNY Upstate Medical University), who will study how proteins that lack a fixed structure form membraneless cellular subcompartments that support biological processes; Cressida Madigan (University of California, San Diego), who will explore the molecular mechanisms by which infections damage the brain; and José Ordovas-Montañés (Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School), who will explore how different cells within a tissue contribute to the initiation and spread of an inflammatory immune response.

The 2021 class of the Pew Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences includes ten postdoctoral fellows from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay who will receive two years of funding to conduct research in laboratories under the mentorship of prominent biomedical scientists. Fellows include Emerson Carmona Rojas (Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center), who will probe the structure and operation of a channel protein that is overactive in some forms of leukemia, and Maria Clara Selles (New York University Langone Health), who will explore whether the hormone oxytocin can protect neurons from the degeneration that accompanies Alzheimer's disease.

And this year's cohort of the Pew-Stewart Scholars Program for Cancer Research, funded in partnership with the Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust, includes five early-career scholars who will receive four-year grants in support of their work to advance treatments and cures for cancer. Recipients include Ansuman Satpathy (Stanford University), who will investigate the genetic mechanisms of T-cell exhaustion, a phenomenon that arises with chronic immune stimulation during infections and cancers, and Liling Wan (University of Pennsylvania), who will investigate how assemblies of proteins come together to regulate the expression of genes and how dysregulation of this process contributes to cancer.

"Biomedical research is one of the best pathways we have to understand and overcome the world's greatest health hurdles," said Craig C. Mello, a 1995 Pew scholar, 2006 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, and chair of the national advisory committee for the Pew Scholars Program. "I am confident that these researchers will uphold the Pew scholar legacy of advancing scientific discovery."