Harvard’s Ya-Chieh Hsu Receives a Glenn Foundation Discovery Award

Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University and a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, received a Glenn Foundation Discovery Award from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and the American Federation for Aging Research. The award was created to support research projects with strong potential to develop pioneering discoveries to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that govern normal human aging and its related physiological decline.

Dr. Hsu will receive $525.000 over three years to pursue her research project titled “Rapid Functional Genetics to Identify Genes that can Rejuvenate Aged Stem Cells.” The project looks to capitalize on powerful new technologies to not only understand the molecular mechanisms that drive stem cell aging but also to identify functionally important genes that can rejuvenate old stem cells.

Dr. Hsu completed her Ph.D. at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she studied pathways controlling growth and proliferation using Drosophila as a model. For her postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University in New York, she delineated the lineage hierarchy of hair follicle cells and investigated how signals from stem cell progeny regulate hair follicle stem cells.