MCB Assistant Professor Carolyn Elya has been named a 2025 recipient of the Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research, a highly competitive honor that supports promising early-career scientists in the region pursuing innovative biomedical research. The award, granted by the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation through a rigorous application process, provides $400,000 in research funding over three years.
Elya, who joined the MCB faculty in 2024, is one of only five researchers selected this year for this distinction. Although the majority of past awardees from Massachusetts hail from Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals, Elya joins a small group of recipients based in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)—and an even more exclusive group within MCB. Previous MCB faculty to receive the award include Craig Hunter (1997), Naoshige Uchida (2007), Ethan Garner (2012), David Cox (2013), and Ryan Nett (2024).
“I’m incredibly honored to be selected for this award,” Elya says. “It’s a vote of confidence not only in our work but also in the importance of basic research into the molecular dialogues between microbes and their hosts.”
Known for her pioneering work on parasitic fungi and behavioral manipulation in insects, Elya investigates how microbial agents hijack their hosts’ nervous systems. Her research combines molecular genetics, neurobiology, and microbiology to reveal fundamental insights into host-pathogen interactions.
For the Smith Family Award, Elya’s proposed project—Leveraging Nature’s “Zombies” to Understand Mechanisms Driving Animal Behavior— focuses on the molecular signals involved in “summiting behavior,” a striking phenomenon in which infected flies climb to elevated locations before death—a behavior thought to benefit fungal spore dispersal. “We’re trying to uncover how the fungus talks to the fly’s nervous system to trigger this very specific and very eerie behavior,” Elya explains. “The project sits right at the intersection of microbiology and neuroscience.”
Though her lab is still in its early years, Elya is already gaining recognition as a bold and imaginative scientist. The Smith Family Award will provide crucial support as she continues to build her research program and train the next generation of scientists.
“This award will give us the flexibility to ask big, risky questions—questions that are hard to fund but that could lead to major discoveries,” Elya says. “I’m deeply grateful to the Smith Foundation for backing this kind of science.”
