The Rita Allen Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, has announced the 2021 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars.

The annual program recognizes early-career leaders in the biomedical sciences whose research has the potential to reveal new pathways to advance human health. This year, five scholars were awarded grants of up to $110,000 for a maximum of five years to conduct pioneering research in the fields of cancer, immunology, and neuroscience — including investigating the role of microglia in postnatal brain development and disorders, the ability of the innate immune system to provide protection against new infections, and how proteins maintain the stability of the genome.

The 2021 Rita Allen Scholars are Joshua Modell (Johns Hopkins University), Lucas Cheadle (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Ellen Foxman (Yale University), Guosong Hong (Stanford University), and Viviana Risca (Rockefeller University).

"We welcome this class of remarkable scientists seeking novel solutions to complex problems at the frontier of biological knowledge," said Rita Allen Foundation president and CEO Elizabeth Good Christopherson. "As we are seeing the importance of decades of biomedical research in confronting the COVID-19 pandemic, the fundamental research these scientists are leading will lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s transformative medicine."