Recipient of the 2026 Seldin~Smith Award for Pioneering Research:
Christina Theodoris, MD, PhD

The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) is pleased to recognize Christina Theodoris, MD, PhD, as the recipient of the 2026 Donald Seldin~Holly Smith Award for Pioneering Research. For this Award, the ASCI provides Dr. Theodoris an honorarium of $30,000 to advance her academic efforts and she delivers a scientific talk at the 2027 AAP/ASCI/APSA Joint Meeting.

The Award recognizes Dr. Theodoris’ work in computational biology to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to understand cell regulation and cell-cell interactions and to produce models that reason about disease states. As a postdoctoral researcher, she developed an AI model called Geneformer that now includes data on more than 100 million human single-cell transcriptomes. Currently, she is using this approach in AI models, notably with the release in 2026 of the model MaxToki, to examine more deeply how cell states change over time and how regulatory information is conveyed between cells.

Dr. Deepak Srivastava nominated Dr. Theodoris for the Award. For the nomination, Dr. Srivastava wrote, “Having known both Drs. Smith and Seldin, I am certain Dr. Theodoris represents the quality and character that these pioneers would be proud of.”

Dr. Theodoris earned her BS from the California Institute of Technology and her MD and PhD from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She completed a combined pediatrics/medical genetics residency from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and she completed postdoctoral work in computational biology from The Broad Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is currently Assistant Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF.

Her work has been recognized by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists (2022), a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Early Independence Award (2023), the Searle Scholars Award (2024), and designation as a Scientific American Young American Scientist (2026), among others.

Nominations were evaluated by the Seldin~Smith Award Selection Committee: Drs. Julie Bastarache (Chair), Stephen Chan, and Rajan Jain. Finalists were evaluated by an Advisory Committee comprising five physician-scientist luminaries: Drs. Joseph L. Goldstein (Chair), Michael S. Brown, Robert J. Lefkowitz, Christine Seidman, and Arthur Weiss.