The Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology is named after CRI Scientific Advisory Council member Dr. Frederick W. Alt of the Harvard Medical School, Immune Disease Institute in Boston, MA, for his many years as chair of the Fellowship Committee of the Irvington Institute for Immunological Research and his seminal contributions to the field of Immunology. 

Since Irvington's merger in 2007 with the Cancer Research Institute, CRI now presents the award annually to a former postdoctoral fellow in recognition of outstanding success in academia or industry for research that may have a potentially major impact on immunology.

2008 Frederick Alt Award Winner

This year’s award winner was Dr. Sankar Ghosh for his contributions to defining mechanisms that regulate the activity of the transcription factor NF-kappa-B that is involved in inducible inflammatory and immune response gene expression and the expression of genes involved in apoptosis. A 1992 recipient of an Irvington Fellowship, Dr. Ghosh has been a professor of immunobiology and of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Yale School of Medicine (to October 2008), and is now the Silverstein Professor and chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University.

Dr. Ellen Puré, chair of the CRI Postdoctoral Fellowship Committee, presented the award to Dr. Ghosh during a special reception and dinner for CRI-funded graduate program students, postdoctoral fellows, and other dignitaries during our annual CRI International Cancer Immunotherapy Symposium, held Sept. 15-17, 2008, in New York City.

In 1989, Dr. Ghosh was awarded an Irvington Institute postdoctoral fellowship while working in the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore at the Whitehead Institute.  Having completed his Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he joined the Baltimore lab where as a postdoc he did his first seminal work in understanding the regulation of NF-kappa-B, publishing multiple papers in premier journals including Nature, Cell and Science.  This period in his training was critical to launching his independent career.

After completing his fellowship, Dr. Ghosh moved as an assistant professor in 1991 to Yale where he is currently a professor.  Although he has spent virtually his entire career up to now at Yale, he has assumed a new position as of October 2008 as the Silverstein Professor and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University. 

Dr. Ghosh’s productivity and the quality of his work has never wavered.  He has received a number of awards including an NIH merit award in 2001, the AAI Pharmingen Investigator Award in 2002, and election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.  He has also been an outstanding citizen serving on a number of editorial boards and grant review committees over the past two decades.

We are proud to acknowledge the devotion of Dr. Alt to training the next generation of scientists, and to recognize the accomplishments of Dr. Ghosh by awarding him the Fred Alt Award.