Xihong Lin, Brendan Manning receive prestigious NCI awards

Two faculty members from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — Xihong Lin and Brendan Manning — will receive prestigious National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Awards (OIA). These multimillion dollar seven-year awards, providing extended funding stability, are aimed at giving promising and productive investigators enough time and money to continue or embark on projects of unusual potential in cancer research—and to take greater risks in their work.

Lin, Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics and chair of the Department of Biostatistics, is globally recognized for her leadership and expertise in statistical genetics and genomics. She will receive $6.6 million to develop and apply innovative statistical and computational methods for analyzing massive genetic and genomic data in cancer epidemiology and clinical science.

Manning, professor of genetics and complex diseases, has led seminal research over the past decade that has shaped understanding of the mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets for the treatment of human diseases, with a core focus on genetic tumor syndromes and sporadic cancers. He will receive $5.3 million for efforts to define the wiring and functions of a signaling network — the PI3K-mTOR network — that is aberrantly regulated at a high frequency across a wide spectrum of human cancers.