The Yale Cardiovascular Research Center (YCVRC) is pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Yale Calabresi Prize in Basic Cardiovascular Research.
The Yale Calabresi Prize recognizes mid-career investigators (individuals who have joined a ladder faculty track in the past four to 10 years) who are engaged in basic cardiovascular research. The choice of the winner is made by an international steering committee and a committee composed of Yale faculty members who are affiliated with the YCVRC. The prize includes a $5,000 cash award and presentation of a plenary lecture at the annual YCVRC meeting.
The winner of the inaugural 2014 Prize is Zoltán Arany, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. According to Michael Simons, M.D., director of the YCVRC, Arany is being recognized “for his work on cardiovascular metabolism and the role of PGC-1alpha that led to a spectacular series of publications” in Nature, Molecular Cell, Cancer Cell, Cell Reports, Cell Metabolism, and a number of other similarly high profile journals.
“Dr. Arany has produced a remarkable series of papers describing this gene, which is responsible for metabolic control of endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes,” said Simons. “These findings represent a major advance in cardiovascular science and, if confirmed over time, will be very influential.”
Arany will be a plenary speaker at the fourth annual YCVRC/North American Vascular Biology Organization meeting, Cardiovascular Inflammation and Remodeling, on May 8 to 10, 2014, at the Omni Hotel in New Haven.
The new prize is made possible by a fund established in 1981 by Massimo and Bianca Calabresi, the parents of Yale Law School Dean emeritus Guido Calabresi and the late Paul Calabresi, the founding chief of medical oncology at Yale. The fund continues to support the long-running Massimo Calabresi Lectureship in Cardiology and Finzi-Contini Lectures at the Whitney Humanities Center.
The International Steering Committee members are: Peter Carmeliet, VIB, University of Leuven, Belgium; Elisabetta Dejana, University of Milan, Italy; Jon Epstein, University of Pennsylvania; Garrett Fitzgerald, University of Pennsylvania; Robert Graham, Victor Chang Institute, Sydney, Australia; Gou Young Koh, KAST, Korea; Richard Lifton, Yale University; Joseph Loscalzo, Harvard University/BWH; Eric Olson, Southwestern University; and Peter Weissberg, British Heart Foundation, London, UK.
The YCVRC Professors Committee members are: Jeffrey Bender, Anne Eichmann, Karen Hirschi, Jordan Pober, Martin Schwartz, William Sessa, Michael Simons, and Lawrence Young.