Romanian-born neuroscientist wins award
Stanford professor honored for work in biomedical research
A Romanian-born Stanford neuroscientist has been awarded a 2018 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, which recognizes young immigrants who have made significant contributions to biomedical research in America.
Sergiu P. Pasca, 36, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, uses models of the human brain — created through cellular reprogramming technology — to explore the biological underpinnings of brain diseases like autism.
He calls his work “molecular psychiatry.”
The first member of his family to attend college, Pasca was born six years before the collapse of Communism in Romania. He has recounted memories of televised broadcasts of hours-long speeches by former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and nightly blackouts during which his mother would read to him by candlelight.
Pasca set up his first science lab and started experiments at the age of 11, in the basement of his parents' 150-year-old house in Aiud, Romania, according to a 2015 interview. A national chemistry prize in high school offered him a full university scholarship — and launched his prestigious career.
“Chemistry was the science of the time,” said Pasca, who trained as a physician and came to Stanford in 2009. “I thought it would be good for me to focus on the chemistry of life.”
The Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise are awarded to young immigrants who have demonstrated exceptional promise early in their careers. They come at a time when immigration is the subject of heated political debate and amid negotiations between the Trump administration and Congressional Democrats over the future of the DACA program that protects people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
The prizes are awarded by the
Vilcek Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia, to raise awareness of immigrant contributions to the United States.
Other 2018 recipients of the $50,000 prize are Polina Anikeeva of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), born in the former Soviet Union, and Feng Zhang, professor in Neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT-Harvard University’s the Broad Institute, born in China.
The largest award, the $100,000 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, was bestowed to Russian-born Alexander Rudensky, chair of the Ludwig Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, for a wide array of findings around the immune system’s regulatory T cells. Rudensky began his scientific career at Lomonosov Moscow State University in the 1970s.
The tally of foreign-born researchers who have won the esteemed Nobel Prizes
also shows the contribution that immigrants — especially Germans, Brits and Russians — have made to the highest levels of American science and economics.
Since 2000, 39 of the nation’s 122 Nobel winners were not born in the United States. That’s 32 percent. The foreign-born population of the United States as a whole was about 13 percent at the last census.
The trend was even more pronounced in our nation’s 2016 and 2017 tally of winners. Immigrants were the majority — 53 percent — of U.S.-based science and economics Nobel laureates in those two years.
These recent winners are dominated by natives of Germany and the United Kingdom.
German-born physicist Rainer Weiss of MIT and chemist Joachim Frank of Columbia University were America’s 2017 Nobel laureates.
Four British-born scientists and one economist won America’s 2016 Nobels: David J. Thouless of University of Washington; F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University; J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University and Sir J. Fraser Stoddart of Northwestern University. Economists Oliver Hart, now with Harvard, was born in England; Bengt Holmström, now at MIT, was born in Finland.
To learn more about the Vilcek Foundation, go to vilcek.org.
A brief video about the life and research of Stanford neuroscientist Pasca can be viewed at: https:// youtu.be/f bkhv jUKork