The Vilcek Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2022 Vilcek Foundation Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. Awarded annually, the prizes honor the contributions of foreign-born scientists to scientific research, discovery, and innovation in the United States.
The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation for the arts and sciences. The foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the foundation was inspired by the couple’s respective careers in biomedical science and art history. Since 2000, the foundation has awarded over $6.4 million in prizes to foreign-born individuals and has supported organizations with over $5.5 million in grants.
Three scholars were honored with Vilcek Foundation Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science this year. One was a woman.
Markita del Carpio Landry, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is being honored for the development of probes to visualize neurochemical communication in the brain, and for breakthroughs in gene-editing technologies with applications for agriculture and the development of edible biologic drugs.
Born in Canada to a Bolivian mother and French Canadian father, del Carpio Landry immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. Dr. del Carpio Landry earned her bachelor’s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and went on to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A physicist by training, she pursued postdoctoral work in nanotechnology and spectroscopy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.