Institute for Advanced Study Receives $7.5 Million Grant from the Starr Foundation
Grant Will Enable Permanent Endowment of a Professorship and Memberships in Biology
The Institute for Advanced Study has received a $7.5 million grant from the Starr Foundation for the Simons Center for Systems Biology in the School of Natural Sciences. The grant provides the resources necessary to secure the Simons Center’s position as a leading center for research and postdoctoral training in the quantitative biology essential to scientific advances that are revolutionizing biology and medicine. It completes the second of two challenge grants from the Simons Foundation intended to establish a permanent endowment for the Simons Center for Systems Biology to cover the core costs of its program. The Starr Foundation grant also counts toward the $100 million capital campaign challenge made by the Simons Foundation and the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences in 2011. The Institute will add $7.5 million from the challenge grant to create a $15 million endowment to support a named Professorship and three Memberships in biology.
“We are incredibly grateful to the Starr Foundation for its generous endorsement of the Institute’s work in theoretical biology,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director of the Institute and Leon Levy Professor. “This grant will enable the Institute to continue to attract the best scientists in the field, advance research into today’s biological complexities and chart new territory.”
This grant complements the Starr Foundation’s existing far-reaching achievements in supporting biomedical research.
“Research in the fields of genomics, stem cells and neuroscience has increased in complexity, but that complexity creates opportunities,” said Maurice R. Greenberg, Chairman of the Starr Foundation. “It is exciting to see the collaborations among biologists, physicists, mathematicians and chemists as they forge new paths to understanding diseases and possible cures. That is what our grantmaking is about: fostering the exploration and development of new opportunities.”
The Institute’s unparalleled international standing in mathematics and theoretical physics places the Simons Center in a unique position to facilitate the development of theoretical and quantitative research in biology. In the last decade, the Center has enabled a number of outstanding scientists to move into the forefront of the field and make an indelible impact at leading academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. The Center was established in 2005 by Arnold J. Levine, now Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, and was named for James H. Simons and his wife, Marilyn Hawrys Simons. Stanislas Leibler, a Professor in the School of Natural Sciences who holds a faculty position jointly at the Institute and the Rockefeller University, is working in the field of theoretical and experimental biology. His work extends the interface between physics and biology to create new solutions and approaches to fundamental biological problems. Leibler and his colleagues are developing an understanding of biological functions on more abstract mathematical level—in one set of studies, they are investigating patterns of gene evolution that suggest how different parts of proteins interact.
Also at the Center, Faculty and Members are actively engaged in a number of areas of cancer research, including identifying the role genes play in the origins of cancers and the metabolism of cancer cells, developing strategies to profile specific cancers and exploring means to improve cancer prevention and treatment strategies. Studies also include path-breaking analyses of viruses, in particular the influenza genome and evolutionary changes that are the result of selection pressures in both virus and host. The Center also is engaged in a four-year collaborative study, Autism and Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in the IGF Pathway, which investigates the frequency of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in selected genes that populate the interrelated signal transduction pathways in individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
Currently, two distinguished biologists, John Hopfield of Princeton University and Albert Libchaber of Rockefeller University, are serving as Visiting Professors at the Center and are actively working with Members and others on key biological problems related to the dynamics of complex systems. With the addition of these grants to its endowment, the Center will be able to support the research of three permanent Professors and a total of up to fourteen Members or Visiting Professors.
About the Starr Foundation
The Starr Foundation was established in 1955 by Cornelius Vander Starr, an insurance entrepreneur who founded C.V. Starr & Co. and other companies later combined by his successor, Maurice R. Greenberg, into what became the American International Group, Inc. Mr. Starr, a pioneer of global business, set up his first insurance venture in Shanghai in 1919. He died in 1968 at the age of 76, leaving his estate to the Foundation. The Foundation currently has assets of approximately $1.25 billion, making it one of the largest private foundations in the United States. It makes grants in a number of areas, including education, medicine and healthcare, human needs, public policy, culture and the environment.
About the Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute exists to encourage and support curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities—the original, often speculative thinking that produces advances in knowledge that change the way we understand the world. Work at the Institute takes place in four Schools: Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science. It provides for the mentoring of scholars by a permanent Faculty of approximately 30, and it ensures the freedom to undertake research that will make significant contributions in any of the broad range of fields in the sciences and humanities studied at the Institute.
The Institute, founded in 1930, is a private, independent academic institution located in Princeton, New Jersey. Its more than 6,000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership throughout the academic world. Thirty-three Nobel Laureates and 40 out of 56 Fields Medalists, as well as many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes, have been affiliated with the Institute.