Rockefeller postdocs Paige Arnold and Jim Castellanos are named Hanna Gray Fellows by HHMI
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Two Rockefeller postdocs, Paige Arnold and Jim Castellanos, have been named 2025 Hanna Gray Fellows by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Arnold is a member of Luciano Marraffini’s laboratory and Castellanos is a member of Elaine Fuchs’ laboratory; both were recognized for their work making foundational discoveries while building an inclusive culture in academic science.
Paige Arnold (Aaron Doster / AP Images for HHMI)
The awards are worth up to $1.5 million each over the course of up to eight years, covering both postdoctoral training and the transition to the start of an independent laboratory as a faculty member. The generous funding will allow Arnold and Castellanos to pursue bold research as postdocs and will provide them with crucial early career support as they transition to PIs.
Arnold joined Rockefeller in 2022 and completed her Ph.D. research in Lydia Finely’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she studied the role of metabolism in determining the fate of embryonic stem cells. As a member of Marraffini’s lab, her research explores how phage hijack bacterial metabolic pathways to support their own dissemination and how bacteria, in turn, exploit phage dependence on host metabolism to avoid death. Her goal is to identify metabolic vulnerabilities among pathogenic bacteria that may be exploited to defend against infection in mammalian cells.
Jim Castellanos (Aaron Doster / AP Images for HHMI)
An anesthesiologist and immunologist, Castellanos is an alumnus of the tri-Institutional MD-PhD program and an anesthesiology resident of Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who joined Rockefeller in 2024. In Fuchs’ lab, he is working to understand the molecular immunology underlying skin stem cells’ ability to promote healing and regeneration, maintain balance of the epithelial microbiome, and regulate epigenetic inflammatory memory. His research aims to reveal the molecular dynamics of human skin healing with the potential to discover new biomarkers and therapeutics for burn patients.
