Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Greenburgh has awarded $160,000 in prize money to 10 young scientists and two institutions in the second year of its Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation competition.
The award was created to acknowledge, reward and foster talented early-career biomedical scientists, Regeneron officials said in a press release.
“Innovation in science and technology is at the heart of Regeneron’s mission to discover and develop new treatments for serious diseases,” said Dr. George Yancopoulos, founding scientist and president of Regeneron Laboratories and chief scientific officer. Â “Investing in science education and the identification and development of talented new researchers is critical to foster tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs.”
Academic institutions this year nominated two graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows for the Regeneron prize. Â Each nomination included a proposal explaining the nominee’s “dream” project in biomedical research and a curriculum vitae, list of publications and a review of the nominee’s productivity in their current laboratory.
Two winners will receive a $50,000 cash prize and their institutions will receive a donation from Regeneron to support their seminar series. The top prize winners  are Daniel Schramek, a postdoctoral fellow at The Rockefeller University in New York, and Kelly Clancy, a graduate student in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Two graduate student researchers were awarded honorable mentions and cash prizes of $10,000 each. They are Daniel Marks, a cancer biology student at Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School, and Xuebing Wu, studying computational and systems biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Regeneron officials said six additional finalists will each be awarded $5,000.
“We look for young scientists who demonstrate the capacity for original thinking and for research proposals that have the potential to drive biomedicine forward,” said Susan Croll, director of the postdoctoral program at Regeneron. “This year’s winners more than met this standard.”
