Ilana Witten named HHMI Investigator

Neuroscientist Ilana Witten, who investigates the brain circuits behind learning and decision-making, has been named a 2024 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator.

Witten, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, is one of 26 new investigators from across the country, selected from nearly 1,000 eligible applicants. 

“I feel very lucky, very honored, very humbled and very excited about what this means our lab is going to be able to do in the coming years,” said Witten. “HHMI likes to say that they fund 'people, not projects,' the idea being that they're trusting you to pursue your passions and do something exciting and interesting. I am very excited about the flexibility HHMI will give us to pursue creative science.” 

Each new investigator will receive about $11 million over a seven-year term. Investigators can renew for another seven years, pending a successful scientific review.

“When scientists create environments in which others can thrive, we all benefit,” said HHMI President Erin O’Shea in a statement. “These newest HHMI Investigators are extraordinary, not only because of their outstanding research endeavors, but also because they mentor and empower the next generation of scientists to work alongside them at the cutting edge.

To date, 34 current or former HHMI scientists have won the Nobel Prize, including Eric Weischaus, Princeton’s Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology, Emeritus, and an emeritus professor in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

“The brain is our most complicated organ,” Witten said. Her lab focuses on how the brain learns and decides in complex environments, such as when there are multiple paths to a reward or when the desired outcome is delayed. 

With this new freedom to pursue blue-sky research, Witten said, “I'm very excited about trying to understand the emergence of mental illness. Of course, we study mice, and mice aren't mentally ill in the sense that you can say a human is, but they can show maladaptive traits. They can give up, in a kind of learned helplessness-type behavior; they can show social avoidance behavior and anxiety-like behaviors. We want to learn, in a stressful situation, why do different individuals learn different things? And how? What is the brain circuitry that leads to some animals becoming 'depressed,' but not others?”

Witten graduated from Princeton University in 2002 with a degree in physics and a certificate in biophysics, then went to Stanford for a Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2012. 

Her previous major awards include a 2023 Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health, a 2019 Brain Research Foundation Scientific Innovations Award, and a 2017 Daniel X Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research, among many others.

Witten joins four other current HHMI Investigators on the Princeton faculty: Bonnie Bassler, the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology; Cliff Brangwynne, the June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and director of Princeton's Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute; Carlos Brody, the Wilbur H. Gantz III ’59 Professor of Neuroscience; and Martin Jonikas, a professor of molecular biology.

Princeton also has several emeritus HHMI investigators, including Trudi Schupbach, the Henry Fairfield Osborn Professor of Biology, Emeritus; Thomas Shenk, the James A. Elkins Jr. Professor in the Life Sciences, Emeritus; and Wieschaus. Shirley Tilghman, an emeritus professor of molecular biology, left her position as an HHMI Investigator in 2001 when she became president of the University.