Two MCB postdocs, Loranzie Rogers of the Bellono Lab and Colin Kim of the Nett Lab, have been awarded prestigious Hanna H. Gray Fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Hanna H. Gray Fellows receive up to 1.5 million dollars in funding as the fellow completes their postdoc and begins their career as an independent investigator.
Rogers and Kim are the only two people from Harvard FAS in the 2024 cohort. They join a vibrant community of existing Hanna H. Gray Fellows that includes MCB faculty Carolyn Elya (2018-present), postdoc Maria Angelica Bravo Nuñez (2020-present) of the Murray Lab , and postdoc Zuri Sullivan (2020-present) of the Dulac Lab.
(l to r) Zuri Sullivan, Maria Angelica Bravo Nuñez, Loranzie Rogers, Colin Kim, and Carolyn Elya
Both postdocs are thrilled to receive this recognition and looking forward to engaging with the fellowship’s diverse scientific community. “It’s a great opportunity to receive this funding, and I am exceptionally grateful to HHMI for continuing to support my research,” says Rogers, who also received HHMI funding through the Gilliam Fellows Program during graduate school.
Kim sees the fellowship as an opportunity to develop his leadership and mentoring skills and thus contribute to the next generation of researchers. “I am extremely honored and very thankful to HHMI for this opportunity,” he says. “It’s a tremendous opportunity not only to grow as a scientist but also as an individual, mentor, and leader in the scientific community.”
The Hanna H. Gray Fellowship supports postdocs from diverse backgrounds who conduct research on a variety of topics. Rogers is studying how amphibians adaptively remodel during metamorphosis from tadpole to adult to be well suited for their novel terrestrial environment, while Kim is investigating the chemical processes that enable plants to produce neuroactive molecules, as well as their biological mechanisms facilitating high specificity and efficiency in building these molecules.
The faculty who are hosting Rogers and Kim are thrilled to see the two receive recognition. “I’m privileged to work with talented and bold postdocs like Loranzie and others who pose and explore fascinating biological questions,” says MCB faculty and Rogers’s adviser Nicholas Bellono. “Our lab typically asks how organisms adapt over the course of evolutionary time to exhibit new behaviors and occupy new ecology. Loranzie is creatively exploiting amphibian metamorphosis because these animals essentially change into new animals to transition from water to land, an extreme environmental shift that necessitated some of those most dramatic evolutionary novelties in animals. I have no doubt he will find cool new biology. We’re soon going to have to invent new awards for Loranzie to win!”
“I just want to reiterate how happy I am for Colin,” says MCB faculty member and Kim’s adviser Ryan Nett. “At one point, he wasn’t sure that he would apply to the Hannah Gray fellowship this cycle because he didn’t feel like he had enough postdoc experience. He was clearly more than ready and we’re lucky to have him in our lab!”
Nett adds, “I would also like to acknowledge the role that everyone in Colin’s community played in this. People in my lab went out of their way to help Colin prepare for his interview with HHMI, and he also received feedback from our neighbors on the 3rd floor of Biolabs, including the Bellono and Elya labs, and Rich Losick. We have a really vibrant community on the 3rd floor of Biolabs, and I’m sure that the feedback from these different scientific perspectives (and many others) helped Colin to succeed. Colin actively sought out all of this feedback, and embraced the critiques he received from everyone — which is not always an easy thing to do. From day one, Colin has been a really important and generous member of the scientific community of my lab, and the department more broadly, and I think he would be the first to acknowledge how critical this community has been to his own success.”
Please join us in congratulating these two exceptional postdocs, and stay tuned for spotlight pieces highlighting their research!
