Dr. Anna Nam, an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and the Gellert Family/John P. Leonard, M.D. Research Scholar in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received a 2025 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award from The Hartwell Foundation. The award provides $100,000 direct cost support per year for three years and designation as a Hartwell investigator.
The award will support Dr. Nam’s research targeting inflammatory pathways that drive systemic lupus erythematosus—commonly referred to as lupus. An autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in the body, lupus affects approximately 1.5 million Americans, predominantly women. Symptoms can include joint pain and swelling, extreme fatigue, chest pain and skin rash. “When children get lupus, the disease is particularly severe with more frequent neurologic and kidney disorders,” said Dr. Nam. She plans to focus on pediatric patients with the aim of improving health outcomes for children with the disease.
Dr. Nam’s laboratory has focused on understanding blood cancers, especially cancers related to blood stem cells that reside in bone marrow, using high-dimensional data to extract detailed information about cell behavior.
“The Hartwell project will be a shift for us,” she said. “We will be studying a noncancerous condition. But the point of intersection are blood stem cells, which produce all the immune cells in the body, and how their behavior may change in the context of inflammation that leads to cancer and other diseases, such as lupus.”
Dr. Nam’s work will be among the first to investigate immune cells in an early stage of development from stem cells, called inflammatory myeloid progenitors, a unique population of cells she and her team recently identified in a study. Prior immunology research, particularly for lupus, has focused largely on mature immune cells, said Dr. Nam. For this project, the team would be looking at stem cells before they mature into immune cells. “We’re aiming to understand the potential role of these progenitor cells in immune diseases, including how to target them so they don’t develop into the highly activated inflammatory myeloid cells that circulate in patients with lupus,” she said.
“It’s a huge honor to receive this award and encouraging to see that leading scientists recognize the potential of our research,” added Dr. Nam.
Dr. Nam’s work will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Virginia Pascual, director of the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health and the Ronay Menschel Professor of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, Dr. Steven Josefowicz, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Dr. John Dick, professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto and a pioneer in cancer stem cell research.
“As we develop novel tools, we’re discovering aspects of the immune system we’ve never known before,” Dr. Nam said. “With this great team of scientists and this funding, we’ll be able to conduct foundational investigations to hopefully develop a new effective therapy for lupus.”
Since 2006, The Hartwell Foundation has been funding biomedical research with the potential to benefit the health of American children. Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Awards are given annually to a limited number of researchers conducting early-stage, cutting-edge research yet to be funded by other sources. Dr. Nam is one of 10 awardees selected from nine institutions by the Hartwell Foundation for the 2025 application cycle.
Dr. Nam’s Individual Biomedical Research Award qualifies Weill Cornell Medicine to designate a Hartwell Fellowship to fund one early-career postdoctoral candidate. Each fellowship provides $50,000 direct cost per year for two years to support specialized training in biomedical research.
