Bin Z. HE, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, has been awarded the James Van Allen Natural Sciences Fellowship for the 2026-2027 fiscal year. This fellowship, which provides $15,000 to support a scholarly project, is a competitive award designed to encourage and support scholarly work in the physical, natural, and mathematical sciences. 

Dr. HE joined the Department of Biology in 2018 and is the principal investigator of the Gene Regulatory Lab where he and his team investigate how stress response networks are rewired during evolution among multiple, independently derived opportunistic yeast pathogens. Their research has expanded to investigate the patterns of gene family expansion and diversification as a shared mechanism for the rise of novel fungal pathogens. 

With the Van Allen Fellowship, Dr. HE and his team will build a series of computational and experimental tools for comprehensively evaluating the evolutionary history of all yeast adhesin families and their contribution to the infection and virulence. The results are expected to have translational impacts on the identification of novel yeast pathogens and potential development of novel treatment strategies. 

Congratulations Dr. HE!