The 2024 Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award: Howard Y. Chang, MD, PhD
Howard Y. Chang, MD, PhD, is the recipient of the 2024 Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) for his contributions to understanding long noncoding RNAs, which impact a variety of human health concerns, including cancer metastasis, human development, and aging.
Dr. Chang received a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Harvard College. He received his PhD in biology at MIT, followed by his MD at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chang completed a residency in Dermatology and a postdoctoral fellowship in Genomics with Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, at Stanford University.
Dr. Chang’s research has focused on mechanisms that coordinate the activities of a large number of genes involved in cell fate control, with a long-term goal to decipher regulatory information in the human genome for disease diagnosis and therapy.
To this end, his group first elucidated fibroblasts’ role in encoding the positional identity of skin cells via specific markings on their chromatin. These insights led to the discovery of an abundance of long intergenic noncoding RNAs that are involved in programming chromatin states, which control positional identity. This discovery opened the door for the development of methods to pinpoint master regulators of genetic positional programming, which have in turn resulted in new laboratory models, treatments, and biological understanding.
Dr. Chang is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research, Professor of Dermatology and Genetics and, by courtesy, Professor of Pathology at Stanford University Medical Center. He is the Director of the NIH Center of Excellence in Genomic Science: Center for Personal Dynamic Regulome, and the Founding Director of the RNA Medicine Program at Stanford. Dr. Chang holds numerous patents and is Co-founder of several companies, including Accent Therapeutics, Cartography Biosciences, and Orbital Therapeutics. He has trained scores of individuals, many of whom are now faculty members, investigators and leaders in academia and industry.
Dr. Chang’s many contributions have been recognized through a number of awards including the the Alfred Marchionini Research Prize, Alfred Marchionini Foundation (2011), the Judson Daland Prize, American Philosophical Society (2014), and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology, National Academy of Science (2018). Dr. Chang has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2018, and was elected to the ASCI in 2009, the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
