The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize was established under the will of the late S. Gross Horwitz through a bequest to Columbia University, and is named to honor the donor's mother. Louisa Gross Horwitz was the daughter of Dr. Samuel David Gross (1805-1889), a prominent surgeon of Philadelphia, and author of the outstanding Systems of Surgery, who served as President of the American Medical Association.  Each year, since its inception in 1967, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize has been awarded by Columbia University for outstanding basic research in the fields of biology or biochemistry. The purpose of this award is to honor a scientific investigator, or group of investigators, whose contributions to knowledge in either of these fields are deemed worthy of special recognition.

The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize website

2011 Louisa Gross Horwitz Press Release

The 2011 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize Lectures

"The Seminal Clock Mutants in Drosophila, in Context of the Emergence of Neurogenetics and Molecular-Genetic Neurobiology" Jeffrey C. Hall, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Biology Brandeis University November 21, 2011 Lecture Time: 10:00 am Lecture Location: Davis Auditorium (Rm. 412), Schapiro Center (CEPSR) 530 West 120th Street

Jeffrey C. Hall putatively became a geneticist during his college and grad-student years. During a subsequent postdoctoral stint he made a lateral move into behavior- and neuro-genetics (much as a duck might make a lateral move à l’orange). This apprenticeship led to a faculty position at Brandeis University, which Hall held from 1974 though 2007. He retired, at last, after tenuously clinging to a 2-year teaching position at the University of Maine (ending late 2009)—unfortunately not then instructing in the area of his almost first love (a Civil War subject, with reference to a course Hall taught at in the History Department at Brandeis, 1990s into the aughts).

As a post-doc and faculty-level researcher, Hall, co-workers, and collaborating investigators performed research in areas revolving round the genetics and molecular-neurobiology of reproductive behavior in Drosophila. During the late 1970s, a discovery in Hall’s lab that an element of fruitfly courtship is rhythmic stimulated him to expand his genetic inquiries into chronobiology - studies that continued in parallel with the reproductively based ones. Both kinds of investigations encompassed isolation of novel behavioral mutants; identification of mutationally defined genes; and manipulations of the latter, aimed at elucidating the neural substrates of courtship behavior and that which is governed by Drosophila’s circadian clock. Because the molecular side of behavioral genetics points to the products of pertinent genes, elements of Hall’s and associates’ research entailed analyses of the mechanisms supported by such molecules - which in turn support neural functions that underlie reproductive and rhythmic behaviors. Many of the latter studies at Brandeis were performed via collaborations between the Hall lab and that of Michael Rosbash (located then & now at the same university west of Boston).

Hall is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal (2003) and, along with Rosbash and Michael Young (Rockefeller University), the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009).

"Old and New Features of Circadian Rhythms" Michael Rosbash, Ph.D. Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Biology Brandeis University November 21, 2011 Lecture Time: 12:30 pm Lecture Location: Alumni Auditorium, First Floor 650 West 168th Street

Michael Rosbash was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His parents had fled Germany in 1938 and moved the family to the Boston area when he was a toddler. His interest in math took him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), but a first biology course and a sophomore summer working in the laboratory of the renowned CalTech biochemist Norman Davidson changed his mind. Rosbash was also seduced by the infectious excitement of those early days in molecular biology, when the genetic code was being cracked. 

After graduating from Caltech in 1965 with a degree in chemistry, Rosbash spent a year at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. He returned to Boston to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966, where he received a doctoral degree in biophysics in 1970. Rosbash joined the faculty of Brandeis University in 1974 after a three year post-doctoral stint at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1989 and is now the Director of the Brandeis National Center for Behavioral Genomics as well as a Professor of Biology.

After moving to Brandeis, Rosbash focused on gene expression regulation, principally the metabolism and processing of RNA in yeast. He was, however, deeply interested in the genetic influences on behavior. Jeffrey Hall also arrived at Brandeis in 1974 and was a close personal friend. Hall was studying behavioral genetics of Drosophila, including the role of the period gene in courtship behavior.In 1982, Rosbash and Hall decided to team up to clone that gene, which they reported in 1984. This was done at the same time and independently by Michael Young and colleagues at the Rockefeller University. A few years later, Rosbash and Hall proposed the mechanism—a transcriptional negative feedback loop—that drives the fruit fly’s internal biological clocks. That model is still largely valid and has been found to be applicable not just to fruit flies but to virtually all animals including humans. Rosbash continues to study the molecular underpinnings of circadian rhythms as well as its relationship to the nervous system and to fly sleep. He still retains a strong interest in the regulation of gene expression.

Rosbash was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. He was awarded the 2009 Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation Neuroscience Prize along with Hall and Young.

"The Genetics of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms in Drosophila" Michael W. Young, Ph.D. Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor Head, Laboratory of Genetics Vice President for Academic Affairs The Rockefeller University November 21, 2011 Lecture Time: 4:00 pm Lecture Location: Alumni Auditorium, First Floor 650 West 168th Street

Michael Young is Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Genetics at The Rockefeller University. He is also the University’s Vice-President for Academic Affairs. Young received a B.A. in biology in 1971 and a Ph.D. in genetics in 1975, both from The University of Texas, Austin. His graduate work, with Burke Judd, examined gene sizes and distributions in the chromosomes of Drosophila. He moved to Rockefeller in 1978, following postdoctoral work on transposable elements with David Hogness in the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University School of Medicine. Young is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Along with colleagues Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash, he received the 2009 Neuroscience Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation for discoveries of molecular mechanisms that control circadian (daily) rhythms.

Young has used the fruit fly, Drosophila for his studies of the circadian clock. The clock gene period, was first cloned by Young, and screens in his laboratory have identified five additional genes that are each essential for production of circadian rhythms. Interactions among these genes, and their proteins, contribute to a network of molecular oscillations within single cells. Young’s discovery and characterization of timeless showed that it permits movement of the transcription factor Period to the nucleus only at night, establishing daily rhythms of period, timeless and other gene activities within the clock. Timeless was also found to be a light-sensitive protein, explaining how circadian rhythms entrain to environmental cycles. Young’s studies of the clock genes double-time and shaggy, casein kinase 1 and GSK-3 orthologs respectively, showed these affect the period length of the rhythm by controlling phosphorylation and stability of Period and Timeless. Later work by others has recognized most of the clock genes discovered by Young and his colleagues in the circadian pathways of vertebrates, including humans.