Two Young Investigators Named to New Bristol-Myers Squibb/James D. Robinson III Junior Faculty Chairs

Faculty Member Grégoire Altan-Bonnet

Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Boards of Overseers and Managers have announced the creation of the Bristol-Myers Squibb/James D. Robinson III Junior Faculty Chairs and have named the first two incumbents: Grégoire Altan-Bonnet of Sloan-Kettering Institute's Computational Biology Program and Songhai Shi of SKI's Developmental Biology Program.

Dr. Altan-Bonnet's laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach of both computational modeling and experimental testing to study immune responses and how they emerge as dynamically and collectively regulated parts of the immune system. He earned his PhD in physics from The Rockefeller University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institutes of Health for five years before joining SKI in 2005.

Faculty Member Songhai Shi

Dr. Shi's laboratory research is focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying the development of the central nervous system in mammals. In particular, he is interested in understanding how neurons originate and in how they develop their unique structures and form functional circuits. Dr. Shi received his PhD in neuroscience from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, before joining Sloan-Kettering Institutes in 2006.

The chairs, made possible by a donation from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, honor retired Bristol-Myers Squibb Chairman and longtime Director James D. Robinson III for his years of service to the company. Mr. Robinson joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Board of Managers in 1970 and subsequently served as Vice Chairman and then Chairman of the Boards. In 1998, he was named Honorary Co-Chairman of Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Boards.