Congratulations to the 2026 IZFS Award Winners!
Chi-Bin Chien Award
Yinan Wan, PhD
University of Basel
Basel, Switzerland
Dr. Yinan Wan is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Alexander Schier at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, where she develops spatial transcriptomics approaches to study vertebrate embryogenesis. She received her PhD in Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge as part of a joint graduate program with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, and holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Peking University. Dr. Wan has a broad interest in the intersection of molecular and biophysical aspects of embryonic and tissue development, and aims to understand how developmental systems balance variability and robustness. She is a recipient of EMBO and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships.
George Streisinger Award
David Jonah Grunwald, PhD
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, United States
David Grunwald grew up on the not-too-rough streets of Queens, NYC, in the shadow of Shea Stadium, home to the New York Mets, a hapless team that was the source of much “Amazin’” inspiration. As a youngster, Grunwald was the beneficiary of the greatest period of rock music, the hopefulness of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and of National Science Foundation programs launched in response to Sputnik and designed to kindle the interest of young people in the sciences.
Early in graduate school Grunwald helped create the first generation of recombinant DNA cloning vectors. Subsequently he worked on RNA tumor viruses that induced leukemias and lymphomas in mice, and the immune responses to these tumors. In 1981 as a postdoctoral fellow, David joined George Streisinger’s pioneering efforts to establish the zebrafish as a vertebrate model organism in which one could perform genetic analyses of embryogenesis and nervous system development and function. There he helped develop methods to mutagenize zebrafish and recover developmental mutants.
Grunwald joined the faculty in Human Genetics at the University of Utah in December 1988. At Utah Grunwald has studied how tissue fates are specified in the early embryo and how pluripotency is maintained in tissue precursors. He has used zebrafish to understand the functions of genes that underlie human variation and to study disease mechanisms.
Throughout his career, Grunwald helped support development of zebrafish research. He was principal organizer of the first CSH Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics. He has advocated at NIH and internationally for supporting zebrafish research. At Utah, Grunwald helped create a shared use communal zebrafish research facility where ~20 laboratories now collaborate. Early on, his laboratory created and distributed to the entire community cDNA libraries of staged embryos. The group has gone on to help develop reliable methods for generating targeted mutations and for precise editing of the zebrafish genome.