Early Career Investigator Award and inclusion on prestigious “35 Innovators Under 35” list among her accolades 

Xin Jin, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, studies the interplay between genetics and physiology in order to understand how that impacts mammalian neurodevelopment, especially in the context of brain disorders. In recent months, she has earned multiple honors for her pioneering work. 

The International Society for Autism Research recognized Jin with its 2022 Early Career Investigator Award. This award is granted to those investigators considered to have the best empirical research papers either published or in press during the past year. In her lab, Jin has established sophisticated engineering technology to identify at scale how certain autism risk genes can impact different brain cell types. 

Jin has also been named to the “35 Innovators Under 35” list— considered one of the most prestigious honors in science and technology—from MIT Technology Review. Each year, more than 500 people are nominated, from which the final 35 are selected by the Review’s editors. The technical work of these individuals promises to shape the coming decades across various domains. 

Most recently, Jin was recognized with a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences from the Simons Foundation. These awards are among the nation’s oldest and most illustrious fellowships for young investigators engaged in neuroscience research. 

She also received the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation Award, accompanied by a $100,000 annual grant for up to three years, and an invitation to attend the Annual Hillblom Scientific Meeting in October 2022 to present her findings. 

And Jin was honored with a Baxter Young Investigator Award, which provides $100,000 toward her research. The Baxter Young Investigator Awards “seek to stimulate and reward research applicable to the development of therapies and medical products that save and sustain patients’ lives.” 

Jin earned her doctoral degree in Biology at The Rockefeller University. She then worked as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows before becoming a faculty member of Scripps Research in 2021.