SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award: Nicholas Bellono and Catherine Jensen Peña  

The SfN Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Young Investigator Award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions by young neuroscientists who lead independent research groups. The award is supported by the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute and includes a $25,000 prize shared by the recipients and recipients’ travel to the SfN annual meeting.

This year’s recipients are Nicholas Bellono, PhD, and Catherine Jensen Peña, PhD. Both researchers apply interdisciplinary approaches to basic-science investigations of how neural pathways in the brain are affected by factors in an organism’s environment.

Bellono, a professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, tackles long-standing fundamental questions in sensory biology that have yielded detailed descriptions of how unconventional model animals adapt to their ever-changing environments. His PhD thesis explored molecular mechanisms that control pigmentation in human skin in response to environmental factors such as sunlight, winning Brown University’s Joukowsky Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Prize. Bellono’s approach of reducing complex behaviors and physiological processes to their simplest components, such as a signaling pathway or single protein function, continued in his postdoctoral work exploring the molecular basis of chemosensation by the gut and electroreception in sharks.

The Bellono laboratory investigation of how jellyfish and sea anemones selectively sting prey but ignore irrelevant stimuli led to the discovery of ion channels that integrate both chemical and mechanical stimuli to control stinging. Bellono has also identified a novel family of receptors in octopuses’ suction cups that are involved in detection of surface-localized chemicals, which octopuses use to find prey. He has since continued exploring non-model systems including limb formation in walking fish, mechanisms of photosynthesis in animals, the piranha feeding frenzy, and more.

Peña is an assistant professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her work focuses on understanding how early life stress in humans and rodents shape brain development. Her research has led to the discovery of epigenetic, molecular, and cellular changes in several key brain regions that result from early life trauma. These genome-wide changes increase one’s risk of developing brain disorders such as depression and other mood, anxiety, and drug disorders. As a postdoctoral fellow and in her own lab, Peña has demonstrated creativity and pushed technological boundaries: using a combination of transgenic mice to track brain activity, genome-wide sequencing and computational methods, and gene therapy to regulate both molecules and brain activity in mice, Peña and her lab have identified new ways that early life stress increases stress vulnerability. Her discoveries push the field closer to more targeted treatments for individuals who experienced early life trauma.