Donor Report – 2023 Spring

Brad’s Update

Spring is in the air and here at the Morgridge Institute, it is both the season of spring and new beginnings. You may notice a new design for this biannual newsletter, and I hope you enjoy the updated look and feel.

In just a few weeks, we will be congratulating and honoring the undergraduate and graduate students finishing their programs and moving on to the next chapters in their careers and lives.

We are also in the final stages of welcoming new outstanding scientists to the institute and expanding our life-changing programs in outreach and education. Both of these changes usher in the next chapter in the Morgridge Institute and are made possible by you.

We are all in a season of new beginnings. As a society, we continue to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s wonderful to see scientists, students, and collaborators navigating in-person, hybrid, and remote work to push science forward.

We also remain steadfast in our support for raising up the next generation of scientists, like Danielle Desa, a postdoctoral fellow in the Melissa Skala Lab. Danielle, like many postdocs here, is an early-career researcher. And your support is vital to helping train and nurture the next generation of scientists. We also want to ensure that we have a culture of excellence and inclusiveness and a place where people care for one another. We are not going to make this process about accumulating prestige or status. We want not only the best possible scientist but the person most likely to make major advances because they are here instead of somewhere else.

In this report, you can learn more about the progress Morgridge scientists are making in many avenues of biomedical science and health. Fundamental research is a catalyzing force in discovery — and
you can read about two avenues of exciting research: one continues our pathbreaking work to understand how viruses replicate — and stop them, and the other seeks to establish a new model animal (the Nile rat!) in diabetes research.

All of this work is made possible by YOU. Thank you for being part of our continued progress in science and discovery — and raising up the next generation.

I hope you enjoy this report. Thank you for helping scientists improve human health. We can’t do this work without you.

Brad Schwartz, M.D.
CEO, Morgridge Institute for Research

P.S. What’s on the cover? You’ll see Danielle Desa, a postdoctoral research fellow, who is working on a project that combines microscopy and stem cells with the potential to deliver better heart disease therapies.