Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Assistant Professor Katherine Alexander has been awarded a 2025 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. The grant provides Alexander with $475,000 per year for five years. It will support her lab’s investigations into nuclear speckles and their potential role in kidney cancer and neuroblastoma.
“We’re at a very exciting time in the speckle field,” Alexander says. “We now have technologies that allow us to get into how things are working. Understanding those fundamental principles of gene regulation will apply a new lens for understanding the dysregulation that occurs not just in cancer, but across all human diseases.”
Established in 2007, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award supports early career researchers working on creative, high-impact projects in the biomedical, behavioral, or social sciences. It is part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Alexander is the second CSHL scientist to receive the award in the program’s history. Associate Professor Lucas Cheadle was selected for the grant in 2022.
Written by: Nick Wurm, Communications Specialist | wurm@cshl.edu | 516-367-5940