Levin Endowment Brings Yale Students to MBL for Research | Yale School of Medicine

In recognition of MBL’s influence on his career and the opportunities it can offer to Yale medical students, Jack Levin, M.D., and his wife Francine have made a philanthropic commitment at Yale to establish the Yale-at-MBL Initiative for Student Research.

Roughly 170 miles up the highway from New Haven, at the southwest tip of Cape Cod, lies Woods Hole, Mass. Nestled in this seaside village, between Eel Pond and the Atlantic coast, is the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), founded in 1888.

A dozen or so Yale scientists head to the MBL every summer, joining some 500 other researchers and trainees from institutions around the world who also spend their summers making use of the MBL’s unique resources and collegial environment. Discoveries by investigators at or affiliated with the MBL have produced more than 50 Nobel prizes since 1920.

Shobana Subramanian (center) became the Yale Medical School’s first Levin Fellow when she joined faculty members Elizabeth Jonas (left) and Leonard Kaczmarek in the MBL's Whitman Center during the summer of 2018. Credit: Dee Sullivan

Hematologist Jack Levin, MD ’57, took full advantage of what Woods Hole offers. During a research fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the early 1960s, which had immersed him in research on platelets—the cells in blood that contribute to blood coagulation—Levin spent a summer at the MBL. Hopkins professor Frederik Bang, MD, was there working on Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab. Their collaboration led to a major scientific discovery about blood coagulation in Limulus, and also to the use of Limulus as a model organism to provide new insights into the non-hemostatic functions of human platelets. The discovery’s significance was such that a resulting product was later commercialized. Read more of the article here.

Source: Endowment to support student research | Yale School of Medicine