Today at its annual general meeting, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of Karel Svoboda, Ph.D., executive vice president and director of Allen Institute’s Neural Dynamics moonshot, and Jay Shendure, M.D./Ph.D., lead scientific director of the collaborative Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes leaders who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and made lasting contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care, and public health.

Svoboda is recognized for discovering synaptic mechanisms of learning and the neural circuit mechanisms underlying planning and movement, and for developing widely used microscopes, molecular tools, and software for cellular imaging in the intact brain.

“I’m honored by this recognition and grateful to the many collaborators and colleagues who contributed to this work, and to the visionary funders who made it possible,” said Svoboda. “I’m especially pleased that the National Academy of Medicine recognizes the vital role that curiosity-driven, fundamental brain research and biophysical methods play in advancing the frontiers of medical science.”

Shendure is recognized for pioneering development of the second wave of genomics technologies for gene discovery, non-invasive testing methods for prenatal diagnosis and cancer, synthetic biology, and to understand gene regulation and embryonic development based on analysis of individual cells.

“I’m thrilled for the recognition of our collective work over many years, and grateful to the many colleagues, trainees, and staff who have made Seattle such an incredible environment for the interface of technology development, basic science, and medically relevant research,” said Shendure.

Both are among 100 new members elected to the National Academy of Medicine this year.

“At the Allen Institute, we’re driven to take on some of the big questions in biology, and Karel and Jay’s work is a perfect example of that,” said Rui Costa, D.V.M./Ph.D., President and CEO of the Allen Institute. “Their innovative approaches are transforming how we study biology and bringing the world closer to understanding the foundations of life itself.”

In keeping with the Allen Institute’s philosophy of open science, their findings, data, and discoveries are shared openly with the global scientific community to catalyze breakthroughs and advance our understanding of health and disease.

Svoboda joined the Allen Institute in 2022. Prior to this, he was a senior group leader at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus where he probed the intersection of neuronal biophysics and cognition to identify core principles underlying information processing in mammalian neural circuits. Svoboda has developed several widely used, cutting-edge methods to study neural structure and function in intact brains. He graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Physics (1988) and from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Biophysics (1994). Svoboda has also been awarded the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2004) and the Brain Prize from the Lundbeck Foundation (2015). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shendure’s research group in Seattle has pioneered exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism, cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine, and whole organism lineage tracing. He is the recipient of the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics (2012), the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and the Mendel Award from the European Society of Human Genetics (2022). Shendure is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.