Skip to main content
http://2022-ADI-Header-Image

Allen Distinguished Investigators

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program supports early-stage research with the potential to reinvent entire fields.

With grants between $1 million and $1.5 million to individuals and scientific teams, these researchers receive enough funding to produce momentum in their respective fields.

Allen Distinguished Investigators are passionate thought leaders, explorers, and innovators who seek world-changing breakthroughs. Their ideas are transformative and their scientific insights are game-changing. They share a pioneering spirit, the ability to imagine possible futures of science, and the ability to create new ways of thinking to share with the world.

Talent is everywhere. Allen Distinguished Investigators may come from small universities or large institutions, cities, or towns across the world. We explore the landscape of bioscience to identify distinguished leaders who will make a difference.

View past awardees

2023 Cohorts

Extracellular vesicles

Extracellular vesicles hold huge promise as a means of therapeutic delivery; however, their diversity and a lack of understanding of their basic biology are hindering progress. This cohort seeks to elucidate fundamental principles of the biology of extracellular vesicles in a variety of contexts, including the development of technologies to better visualize and track them in living organisms.

Sex Hormones

Researchers in this cohort are uncovering the cellular and molecular actions of sex hormones outside of reproduction and reproduction-related development. Their work addresses a key need to deepen our understanding of how sex hormones affect many of biological processes. These new discoveries have the potential to impact human health, including diagnostics and treatment.

2022 Cohorts

Nutrient Sensing

Researchers in this cohort are developing new technologies to measure or visualize nutrient levels within cells. Their work addresses a key need in the field, namely the ability to capture detailed information about metabolites, chemical compounds, and other nutrients in live individual cells. These new techniques could propel understanding of the basic biology of cells as well as how metabolism or nutrition processing goes wrong in diseases like diabetes or malnutrition.

 

Protein lifespan

Proteins are the building blocks of life — nearly all cellular structures and processes are built and carried out by proteins. Do our proteins age like our bodies age? While scientists have discovered how cells turn over old proteins to create new forms, it’s not clear how lifespan varies among different kinds of proteins, what it means to have “old” proteins, or how the cellular environment could affect protein aging. Researchers in this cohort are building new technologies and designing experiments to address important questions around protein lifespan and aging.

2021 Cohorts

Neural Circuit Design

Researchers in the Neural Circuit Design cohort are studying evolutionary principles in the brain circuits that control movement, focusing on animals and systems that are not traditionally studied in the laboratory. Their studies will flesh out a more complete picture of the diversity of nervous systems and motor neural circuits in the animal kingdom, as well as pinpointing common and conserved principles of motion and motor control.

Micropeptides and immunity

Our genomes contain vast amounts of DNA that remain poorly understood. A recent arrival on the scene of genomic “dark matter”: micropeptides, tiny proteins coded by tiny genes that had long escaped notice due to their size but that appear to be present in large numbers in our genome and that of every other living thing. These small molecules likely play roles in many different biological processes; scientists are recently uncovering their influence in several different diseases and in the function of the immune system. Scientists in the Micropeptides cohort are shedding new light on how micropeptides influence immunology, in health and in disease.

Synthetic biology advances for human tissues

The field of synthetic biology has made incredible advances in recent years, and yet the complexity of mammalian biology presents an additional challenge for scientists aiming to engineer tissue or organoids in the lab. The investigators in the Mammalian Synthetic Development cohort are working to cross many of the barriers to mammalian synthetic biology, including several approaches to improve the development and engineering of organoids, lab-grown mini-organs typically derived from human stem cells. Their work spans many parts of the human body, including the liver, lungs, brain, and connective tissues.

 

Past Allen Distinguished Investigators

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program was launched in 2010 by the late philanthropist Paul G. Allen to back creative, early-stage research projects in biology and medical research that would not otherwise be supported by traditional research funding programs. A total of 130 Allen Distinguished Investigators have been appointed during the past 12 years. Each award spans three years of research funding.

Meet the investigators.

Will Bailis, Ph.D. | University of Pennsylvania

Yasmine Belkaid, Ph.D. | National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Chris Bennett, M.D. | University of Pennsylvania

Michelle Digman, Ph.D. | University of California, Irvine

Nandita Garud, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Aida Habtezion, M.D., MSc FRCPC | Stanford University

Ruaidhri Jackson, Ph.D. | Harvard Medical School

Russell Jones, Ph.D. | Van Andel Institute

Megan King, Ph.D. | Yale University

G.W. Gant Luxton, Ph.D. | University of California, Davis

Simon Mochrie, Ph.D. | Yale University

Maho Niwa, Ph.D. | University of California San Diego

Jennifer Prescher, Ph.D. | University of California, Irvine

Nikolai Slavov, Ph.D. | Northeastern University

Daniel Starr, Ph.D. | University of California, Davis

Carolina Tropini, Ph.D. | University of British Columbia

Katharine Ullman, Ph.D. | University of Utah

Gene Yeo, Ph.D, MBA | University of California San Diego

Samantha Morris, Ph.D. | Washington University in St. Louis

Joshua Rabinowitz, Ph.D. | Princeton University

Clive Svendsen, Ph.D. | Cedars-Sinai

Savas Tay, Ph.D. | University of Chicago

James Wells, Ph.D. | Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Chenghua Gu, Ph.D. | Harvard Medical School

Baljit S. Khakh, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Marc Kirschner, Ph.D. | Harvard Medical School

Scott Manalis, Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Clodagh O’Shea, Ph.D. | Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Michael Rosen, Ph.D. | The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Christian Steidl, M.D. | BC Cancer Research Centre and the University of British Columbia

Matthias Stephan, M.D., Ph.D. | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington

Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, D.V.M., Ph.D. | Champalimaud Foundation

David Weinstock, M.D. | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Suneel Apte, M.B.B.S., D. Phil. | Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute

Jason Buenrostro, Ph.D. | Broad Institute and Harvard University

Fei Chen, Ph.D. | Broad Institute

Jan Ellenberg, Ph.D. | European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Charles A. Gersbach, Ph.D. | Duke University

Jeffrey Holmes, M.D., Ph.D. | University of Virginia

Steve Horvath, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Ralf Jungmann, Ph.D. | Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and LMU Munich

Rachel Whitaker, Ph.D. | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Ethan Bier, Ph.D. | University of California, San Diego

James J. Collins, Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. | University of California, Berkeley

Bassem Hassan, Ph.D. | Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM)

Fred “Rusty” Gage, Ph.D. | Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Daniel Geschwind, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Steve Horvath, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Jeffrey Iliff, Ph.D. | University of Washington School of Medicine & VA Puget Sound

Martin Kampmann, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

Aimee Kao, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

Ragnhildur Thóra Káradóttir, Ph.D. | University of Cambridge

Michael Keiser, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

David Kokel, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

William Lowry, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Jeffrey Macklis, M.D., D.HST | Harvard University

Kathrin Plath, Ph.D. | University of California, Los Angeles

Thomas Reh, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Fred Rieke, Ph.D. | University of Washington

William Rooney, Ph.D. | Oregon Health & Science University

David Rowitch, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

Erik Ullian, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

Rachel Wong, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Feng Zhang, Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Long Cai, Ph.D. | California Institute of Technology

Michael Elowitz, Ph.D. | California Institute of Technology

Marshall Horwitz, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Neil Kelleher, Ph.D. | Northwestern University

Jay Shendure, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Bruce Chabner, Ph.D. | Massachusetts General Hospital

Markus Covert, Ph.D. | Stanford University

Evan Eichler, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Hana El-Samad, Ph.D. | University of California, San Francisco

Thierry Emonet, Ph.D. | Yale University

Adrienne Fairhall, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Jeff Gore, Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Suckjoon Jun, Ph.D. | University of California, San Diego

Chet Moritz, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Svante Pääbo, Ph.D. | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Tom Shimizu, Ph.D. | FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF)

Joshua Smith, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Christopher Walsh, M.D., Ph.D. | Harvard University

Steven Zucker, Ph.D. | Yale University

David Anderson, Ph.D. | California Institute of Technology

Ed Boyden, Ph.D. | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Michael Dickinson, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Eric Klavins, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Christof Koch, Ph.D. | California Institute of Technology

Jennifer Nemhauser, Ph.D. | University of Washington

Mark Schnitzer, Ph.D. | Stanford University

Tony Zador, Ph.D. | Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory