This past week, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute named 50 graduate students and their advisors to the 2024 cohort of the Gilliam Fellows Program. Among them was MB&B’s Kyrillos Abdallah and his advisor Wendy Gilbert, selected from a field of over 700 applications.
The Gilliam Fellows Program recognizes and celebrates the impact of mentorship in developing future leaders in science. The program offers their fellows leadership training, professional development sessions, and the opportunity to join a vibrant, diverse community of their peers, program alumni, and HHMI scientists. Concurrently, their advisors undergo HHMI’s intensive mentorship skills development course and learn to promote an inclusive graduate training environment at their institution. Finally, the program offers each student-adviser pair with up to three years of funding for the student’s dissertation research, as well as discretionary funds for professional development.
Kyrillos Abdallah is a fourth year graduate studying the molecular mechanisms behind alternative, noncanonical protein synthesis pathways. These molecular processes are highly choreographed, and play a role in a variety of medical conditions, from viral infection to cancers. After graduate school, Kyrillos plans to stay in academia and work towards a faculty position. He is especially excited to be a Gilliam Fellow so that he may gain the tools to create an inclusive and effective learning environment for his mentees, in all stages of his academic career.
MB&B’s Wendy Gilbert has spearheaded a variety of DEI initiatives at Yale. She has championed equitable recruiting processes for both junior faculty and graduate students in the department and has restructured her courses to ensure inclusive discussions. Additionally, over the last few years, Wendy and others in the Gilbert and Thoreen lab have developed an enrichment course for the Yale Pathways to Science program, which provides promising middle and high school students from diverse backgrounds an opportunity to experience science at Yale. They hope to expand these enrichment courses in the coming years with support from the Gilliam fellowship!
Congratulations Kyrillos and Wendy!
Shravani Balaji