2026 Award Winners

Junior Faculty Award: Natalie E. Dean, Ph.D

Natalie E. Dean, Ph.D. started her research group at Emory in 2021 and is now an Associate Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory. Dr. Dean also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology.

Dr. Dean’s multi-disciplinary research focuses on infectious disease surveillance, vaccine evaluation, as well as the design and analysis of vaccine trials during outbreaks. Her team’s work has made seminal contributions to each of these areas and their findings have been published in leading journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, The Lancet, PNAS, and JAMA. Dr. Dean has published an impressive 79 research articles, with these papers accruing over 10,000 citations, collectively. Her work has been supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Health Organization.

Beyond her direct scientific impact, Dr. Dean’s work has helped to solve time-sensitive infectious disease crises and provided tools to better address future challenges. For example, her findings have been used to guide public health policy for the prevention of infectious diseases including SARS-CoV-2, Dengue, and Ebola. Dr. Dean has also made many media appearances, providing direct communication with the public during outbreaks including the recent coronavirus pandemic.

Senior Faculty Award: Dr. Khalid Salaita, PhD

Dr. Khalid Salaita, PhD, is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Chemistry Ph.D. program. Dr. Salaita is a Program Faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and at the Winship Cancer Institute as well. He is a pioneer in the field of molecular mechanobiology. His laboratory has developed a suite of molecular force probes and tools that have made cell forces measurable and experimentally tractable. His work has led to the creation of new force-based tools that include mechano-PCR, mechano-tagging, and mechano-omics technologies that are helping to transform the study of mechanobiology. These probes have revealed the forces involved in a variety of processes spanning from immune recognition and stem cell development to coagulation and invasion. These insights have a broad impact and several research groups around the world are now using his technologies.

Dr. Salaita’s scholarship excellence is reflected in over 130 peer-reviewed publications, more than 10,000 citations, and an H-index of 55. His contributions have been recognized through many awards, most notably: the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Camille-Dreyfus Teacher Scholar award, the National Science Foundation Early CAREER award, the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellowship. Most recently, he was awarded the Merck Future Insight Prize, which honors pioneering scientists with a ‘no strings attached’ research grant of up to €1 million. He currently directs an NIH-funded RM1 Biomedical Technology Development and Dissemination Center focused on molecular probes for mechanobiology, a role that speaks both to his vision and his contributions to the broader research community.

Dr. Salaita’s scholarship has had a major impact on how the field studies and measures mechanical forces in cell biology in different areas of the biological sciences that span from immunology to cancer biology and coagulation. Dr. Salaita’s research represents sustained, original, and field-defining scientific excellence, with lasting impact on both fundamental and translational research.