Penn’s Sarah A. Tishkoff receives 2009 National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award
Penn Associate Professor Sarah Tishkoff, pictured at top, is one of the 18 recipients of the the 2009 National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award.
Penn geneticist Sarah A. Tishkoff, one of the world’s leading experts in the gathering and analysis of human genetic data, has been awarded the 2009 National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, by Francis S. Collins, director of the NIH. One of 18 honorees, Tishkoff will receive the award Thursday, Sept. 24, at NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md.
Tishkoff, the David and Lyn Silfen University Associate Professor and a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, holds joint appointments in the Department of Genetics in the School of Medicine and the Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.
The NIH Director’s Pioneer Award provides $500,000 in funding per year for five years for investigators of exceptional creativity whose research has the potential significantly impact broad, important problems in biomedical and behavioral research. Tishkoff plans to use funding from the $2.5 million award to understand how genetics and the environment influence physiologic traits, with focus on traits that play a role in common diseases including diabetes, hypertension, obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Tishkoff works primarily in Africa, where she has compiled the world’s most extensive DNA database, representing more than 7,000 Africans from more than 100 ethnic groups. Her research examines how genetic variations and genetic diversity can affect a wide range of practical issues, including, for example, differences in human susceptibility to disease, metabolism of drugs and evolutionary adaptation.
Her most recent work involved a 10-year collaboration with African, American and European researchers working on the largest-ever study of African genetic data — more than 4 million genotypes — providing a library of new information on the continent which is thought to be the source of the oldest settlements of modern humans.
Tishkoff’s research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Keck Foundation and the Leakey Foundation. She has won a Packard Career Award and a Burroughs/Wellcome Fund Career Award and was named one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” American scientists in 2003.
A slide show of the team’s fieldwork, with audio, is available at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/home/SASFrontiers/tishkoff.html.
Originally published on Sept. 24, 2009
