The Jane Coffin Childs Fund for Medical Research Names its 2026 Fellows

Thirty-two outstanding postdoctoral fellows selected as awardees to distinguished fellowship program in biomedical research.

NEW HAVEN, Conn., June 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (Jane Coffin Childs Fund/JCC Fund) is an unwavering supporter of biomedical research, having funded early-career researchers for nearly ninety years. The JCC Fund advances pioneering science by backing the brilliant postdoctoral fellows conducting fundamental research on cancer and human disease.

Fellows were selected by the Board of Scientific Advisors from an extraordinary applicant pool. Awardees are selected based on their research accomplishments to date, their research plans, and their proposed scientific environment and mentors. Awardees are conducting research that will inform our understanding of diseases such as ALS, autoimmunity, cancer and sepsis. Projects goals range from mapping how tumor cells access nutrients to inform anti-tumor growth therapies, to defining host cooperative defenses against bacterial infection to prevent sepsis.

"The 2026 JCC Fellows represent something we all need right now: scientists with the training, the drive, and the imagination to ask questions the rest of us haven't thought to ask yet," said Sue Biggins, Ph.D., chair of the JCC Fund's Board of Scientific Advisors. "This recognition honors their exceptional graduate work — and makes a bet on the breakthroughs still to come. At a difficult moment for science, it is exciting to celebrate this cohort and invest in our future." Biggins is an HHMI Investigator and Director of the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, as well as a former JCC Fund Fellow.

In total, nearly $9M is committed to the 2026 cohort of fellows to provide three years of stipends by the Jane Coffin Childs Fund and its partners: the Robertson Foundation, the Achelis & Bodman Foundation, Coefficient Giving, JJJ Charitable Foundation, The Hope Funds for Cancer Research, Johnson & Johnson and Merck Research Laboratories. The next round of applications for the 2027 cohort will open in October 2026.

"We are thrilled to have our third largest cohort of fellows since our founding," said Anita Pepper, Ph.D., executive director of the JCC Fund. "We are grateful to our philanthropic partners, whose investments in JCC's tried-and-true model of catalyzing remarkable scientific careers alongside cutting-edge scientific impact make this expansion possible."

The Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research was established by the Childs Family in 1937 to honor the memory of Jane Coffin Childs. Inspired by the founding purpose to support research into the causes and treatment of cancer, the Fund's mission has broadened to support fundamental scientific research that advances our understanding of the causes, treatments, and cures for human disease. More information about the fund and the fellows it supports can be found on the website https://www.jccfund.org/.

SOURCE The Jane Coffin Childs Fund For Medical Research