The Vallee Foundation is thrilled to champion exceptional women in the biomedical sciences through our Kuggie Vallee Distinguished Lecture series. Named in honor of our Foundation's co-founder, this series celebrates women who have achieved leadership in their fields.  Dr Kuggie Vallee, a former Professor of Biology at Lesley College and later a Lecturer at Harvard University’s Center for Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences and Medicine, was dedicated to advancing the careers of her female students. 

This year, we are particularly delighted to have two Distinguished Lecturers: Dr Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology (Stanford University and an HHMI Investigator) and and Dr Erin Schuman, PhD, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, and a Vallee Visiting Professor.

The 2024 Kuggie Vallee Distinguished Lectures will be held at MIT's Picower Institute on the morning of Tuesday, September 24 and will be followed the next day by workshops for female faculty given by Dr Kara McKinley, PhD, HHMI, Harvard University; Dr Susan Silbey, PhD, Leon & Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology, MIT; and Dr Stacie Weninger, PhD, President, F-Prime Biomedical Research Initiative. 

Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neurology at Stanford University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Her research program focuses at the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and brain cancer biology with an emphasis on neuron-glial interactions in health and oncological disease. Her laboratory studies how neuronal activity regulates healthy glial precursor cell proliferation, new oligodendrocyte generation, and adaptive myelination. Dr Monje has led several of her discoveries from basic molecular work to clinical trials. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences and election to the National Academy of Medicine. 

Erin Schuman, PhD, is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt. She has a longstanding interest in molecular and cell biological processes that control protein synthesis and degradation in neurons and their synapses. She has recently been named the 2024 Körber Prize winner in recognition of her discovery that many proteins are actually formed at the interfaces between neurons. Dr Schuman is a member of EMBO, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. She has received numerous prizes including the Society for Neuroscience’s Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the FENS-Kavli-ALBA Diversity Prize, the FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award and is the co-recipient of the Rosenstiel Prize for Biomedicine and the Brain Prize.