Two NYU School of Medicine Neuroscientists Win Sloan Fellowships

Jeremy Dasen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience and a member of the Smilow Neuroscience Program, and Greg Suh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Cell Biology and a member of the Skirball Institute, won prestigious research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation this year. The two-year fellowships recognize exceptional young researchers early in their careers.

Dr. Dasen, a developmental neurobiologist, studies the genetic basis of neuronal circuits in the central nervous system, using the spinal cord as a model system. He is particularly interested in a large family of genes named Hox — shorthand for a snippet of DNA called homeobox — that determine the connections that will be formed between motor neurons in the spinal cord and their muscle targets in the limbs, among other functions. Dr. Dasen earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego and completed his postdoctoral training with Thomas Jessell at Columbia University. He joined NYU School of Medicine in 2006.

Dr. Suh, a neurobiologist, studies how fruit flies recognize cues, such as odors emanating from a morsel of food or from stressed flies, and then respond with appropriate behaviors. Which neurons in the brain are activated in response to such cues? Are the behavioral responses hardwired? To answer these questions, Dr. Suh is using sophisticated genetic and imaging tools that allow him to identify individual neurons in a fruit fly, which has one million neurons (by comparison, humans have one trillion neurons). Dr. Suh earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed his postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology. He joined NYU School of Medicine this year.

A Sloan Foundation fellowship carries an award of $50,000. This year 118 scientists, mathematicians, and economists were given the fellowships. Since 1955, the first year the awards were given, 35 recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.