ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2025
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University where he runs an immunology research lab and serves as a molecular pathologist.
Dr. Chen majored in biochemistry at the University of Chicago, where he received the Frances Knock Award. He earned his MD and PhD from Yale. Under the mentorship of Susan Kaech, he led a research project validating his hypothesis that the prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) receptors are co-inhibitory molecules that are upregulated by exhausted CD8 T cells. He further showed that co-blockade of the PGE2 and PD-1 signaling pathways has therapeutic effect (Nature Medicine). This work was recognized with the Yale MD/PhD Alumni Award and led to cancer immunotherapy clinical trials combining prostaglandin and PD-1 blockade. He trained in anatomic pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was Chief Resident, and completed a fellowship in molecular pathology at Harvard.
Dr. Chen’s research examines the organization of the anti-tumor immune response and how the tumor microenvironment can be rendered more susceptible to immunotherapy. As a postdoctoral fellow under Nir Hacohen at the Broad Institute, he co-led a large-scale single cell study of human colon cancer and discovered a spatially-organized multicellular network called an “immunity hub” associated with immunologically active DNA mismatch repair-deficient cancer (Cell). This work won the Martin Prize as MGH’s best research paper in 2022. In ongoing work, he found a connection between MAPK inhibition, immunotherapy, and immunity hubs (Nature Medicine). He subsequently discovered that immunity hubs are also present in human non-small cell lung cancer and their abundance predicts patient immunotherapy response. In this study, he further discovered a subclass of immunity hub, termed the “stem-immunity hub,” that was especially favorably associated with response (Nature Immunology). Dr. Chen was awarded the SITC Forward Fund Astra-Zeneca fellowship and an NCI K08 award.