Bruce Lamb named Watanabe Life Sciences Champion
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The BioCrossroads Board of Directors named Dr. Bruce Lamb their annual 2023 August M. Watanabe Life Sciences Champion of the Year.
Lamb is the executive director of the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Stark Neurosciences Research Institute and co-directs the Neurosciences Institute, a partnership between the IU School of Medicine and IU Health.
The award, named after BioCrossroads’ late Chairman August Watanabe, was announced today at the Indiana Life Sciences Summit. Directors, in a news release, said the honor recognizes Lamb’s research on the causes and potential treatments of Alzheimer’s disease.
“As we were planning our 2023 Life Sciences Summit, which focuses on Indiana’s globally significant work related to Alzheimer’s disease, one name kept coming up as the catalyst or force behind much of the progress being made: Dr. Bruce Lamb,” BioCrossroads Board Chair Dan Peterson said in the release. “It was clear who had earned our annual Watanabe award.”
The Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, led by Lamb, is a team of more than 100 IU faculty investigators who have secured $75 million in National Institutes of Health funding to research everything from addiction and neurodegenerative disorders to spinal cord and brain injury.
BioCrossroads names Lamb’s achievements in a news release. Among them, Lamb has overseen a more than $55 million increase in funding at the Stark institute, earning the school the National Institute on Aging’s distinction of fourth most funded school in the United States.
Lamb also leads the Model Organism Development and Evaluation for Late-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, or MODEL-AD, Consortium, which received a five-year, $48.8 million renewal of its work researching Alzheimer’s disease.
The 2023 Watanabe Champion also collaborates with Purdue researchers at the Target Enablement to Accelerate Therapy Development for Alzheimer’s Disease (TREAT-AD) drug discovery center and helped launch Monument Biosciences, which studies how research discoveries can be translated to potential Alzheimer’s disease therapies.
Lamb began his professional career at Case Western Reserve University and served at the Cleveland Clinic before joining the IU School of Medicine in 2016. He has received honors like the National Civic Award and the Zaven Khachaturian Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alzheimer’s Association.
He serves on the board of the Alzheimer’s Association and chairs the organization’s Medical and Scientific Advisory Group. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania before completing a post-doctoral fellowship at John Hopkins University.
Past Watanabe Life Sciences Champions can be found on the BioCrossroads website at biocrossroads.com/watanabe-life-sciences-champions-over-the-years.