Maayan Levy, an assistant professor of microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, has been named one of the 15 Searle Scholars for 2019. The Scholars will each receive an award of $300,000 in flexible funding to support their work over the next three years. The Searle Scholars Program makes grants to selected universities and research centers to support the independent research of exceptional young faculty in biomedical sciences and chemistry who have recently been appointed as assistant professors on a tenure-track appointment.

The overall research interest in the Levy lab is to understand communication between the gut microbiome and host immunity, focusing on intestinal epithelial cells as mediators of this interaction. The research questions of her lab center on how the delicate balance between host defense against microbial invasion and tolerance to innocuous members of the microbiome nutrients is maintained by intestinal epithelial cells, and how, when this goes awry, chronic inflammatory diseases result. Dr. Levy received her doctoral degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, before starting her lab at Penn in 2018. She has received the Rappaport Prize for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award and the Keystone Symposia Future of Science Fund Scholarship.