Ulrich Mueller Ph.D., and Erika Pearce, Ph.D., from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a private, nonprofit community of scientists committed to furthering science and scientific research within the United States.
Mueller, Ph.D., a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Biology, and Pearce, Ph.D., a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Immunology and Cellular Metabolism in the Department of Oncology and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, are among 125 researchers elected to NAS this year and will now be a part of 2,705 active members of the organization. Scientists elected to NAS are selected by their peers based on their exceptional contributions in research.
Mueller, who is also on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is an internationally recognized expert on hearing loss and brain development who investigates how the nervous system processes sound and what happens when the brain does not properly respond to external stimuli. His research on the mutations involved in hearing loss holds promise for translation into medical solutions to reverse the process. He co-founded Decibel Therapeutics, which collaborated with Regeneron to develop a gene therapy for a genetic form of hearing loss. This treatment recently received FDA approval.
Pearce, who is also on the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of immune metabolism. She is co-director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center's Cancer Immunology Program and the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute's Immune Metabolism Program, and she. Her research investigates how immune cell behavior is tightly controlled by metabolism. She is working to develop ways of modulating immune cell metabolism to enhance therapies against inflammation, cancer and other diseases. Her seminal work on metabolic competition between cancer cells and T cells in the tumor microenvironment as a driver of successful vs. failed anti-tumor immunity has proven foundational to the field of cancer immunology and holds promise for important clinical applications.
A full list of newly elected members can be seen here
