Whitney Henry and Harikesh Wong have been named 2026 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the 21-member class of early-career researchers on June 16, which includes these two MIT scientists and two alumni. Each scholar will receive four years of funding to pursue cutting-edge research into human health and disease.
Henry, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will use the Pew scholarship to study how a stress-induced cell death program called ferroptosis contributes to injury and regeneration in the liver. Wong, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and core member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will investigate how groups of immune cells reach a