Myriam Heiman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, will become the director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, effective July 1. She succeeds Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai, who is stepping down after leading the institute for 16 years. Heiman, a molecular neurobiologist and geneticist, studies the neurodegenerative diseases of the brain's basal ganglia, including Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease. Using cutting-edge techniques, including single-cell genomics and a powerful transcriptomic technique she helped invent, called translating ribosome affinity purification, she aims to understand the molecular changes that eventually lead to cell death in these diseases. 'Myriam is an extraordinary scientist, a proven leader within MIT, and a deeply caring and generous mentor. Her research to determine why specific brain cell types are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Huntington's has produced studies that are both deep in...
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