ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Rachel Wolfson, MD, PhD is an early career physician-scientist interested in the intersection between neuroscience, molecular biology, and gastroenterology.
As an undergraduate Dr. Wolfson worked with Dr. Calvin Kuo (Stanford) investigating the genes involved in cancer progression. This work sparked her passion for science motivated by clinical questions and has had a lasting impact on both her science and career trajectory as a physician-scientist. She pursued her graduate work with Dr. David Sabatini (MIT) studying how cells sense nutrients upstream of an important growth pathway and discovered the first amino acid sensor for the pathway. This work culminated in four co-first author papers, including in Science and Nature, receiving the Leon Reznick Memorial Prize for a record of excellence and accomplishment in research at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and graduating magna cum laude from HMS with her MD/PhD.
After graduate school Dr. Wolfson returned to the hospital wards and started to think beyond how cells sense their environment and into how organisms sense their environment. She was inspired by thinking about the gastrointestinal tract as a sensing organ, with sensory neurons that sense gut luminal contents under various conditions, and mediate responses. However, the diversity of gut innervating sensory neurons and the mechanisms through which distinct mediators activate them remains unclear. She decided to study these questions with Dr. David Ginty (HMS) and found that five DRG sensory neuron genetic subtypes innervate the colon with distinct morphologies, physiologic responses to colon distension, and effects on behavior, which was recently published in Cell.
Dr. Wolfson's long-term goals are to run a basic science research lab studying how gastrointestinal tract innervating sensory neurons respond to diverse stimuli on a molecular level, in order to find treatments to help patients with gastroenterology conditions, such as abdominal pain and motility disorders, while treating patients with these disorders as a gastroenterologist.