11/15/2017
A Lifetime of Achievement; Dr. Sen Honored
Ganes C. Sen, PhD, of the Department of Immunology, Lerner Research Institute, received the prestigious Honorary Lifetime Membership Award from the International Cytokine and Interferon Society at its November "Cytokines 2017" conference in Kanazawa, Japan. Dr. Sen was honored for his contributions to the field of interferon research. Interferons are proteins that are made and released by host cells in response to the presence of harmful foreign pathogens. His work has greatly expanded the scientific community's understanding of how they contribute to immune and antiviral responses.
For over four decades, Dr. Sen has been on the leading edge of interferon research. During his postdoctoral training at Yale University, Dr. Sen and his colleagues identified two enzymes that are important for interferon's antiviral response, PKR and RNase L. He later went on to join Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University to start his own research program. There he studied genes that mediate interferon activity and investigated how some viruses can induce interferon synthesis.
Dr. Sen joined Cleveland Clinic in 1988, where he chaired the Department of Molecular Biology (later renamed the Department of Molecular Genetics) for ten years. Now as a staff member in the Department of Immunology, he continues to lead the field and make cutting-edge discoveries, including recent work on a class of interferon-induced proteins called IFITs.
Since 2003, Dr. Sen has served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research and was also an Editor for the Journal of Virology. He has trained over 70 young scientists in the study of cytokines. The recipient of many scientific honors, Dr. Sen received the Milstein Award from the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research and the Boltzmann Award from the European Cytokine Society. He was formerly an F1000 Prime Faculty member in Microbiology/Virology and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Sen holds The Thomas Lord Endowed Chair in Molecular Biology and is Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.
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