The Foundation announced the 2024 recipients on Dec. 3. 

Toettcher, associate professor of molecular biology and the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, studies how cells perform complex tasks in response to cues from their environment. His lab looks for ways to better understand and control these responses, with potential implications for organ regeneration and cancer treatment. 

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program will award $1.5 million over three years to each of six research projects. The funding is for research that investigates how cellular components that carry out functions within the cell, called organelles, communicate with each other, and how cellular membranes form, function and behave. Toettcher and Ileana M. Cristea, Henry L. Hillman Professor of Molecular Biology, will specifically research how viruses affect organelle connections in a host’s cells, forcing infected cells to prime their neighbor cells to become more susceptible to infection. Toettcher and Cristea will develop tools to monitor these organelle connections, hoping to expand our understanding of cell interactions and immunity. 

Toettcher joined the Princeton faculty in 2015 following a Cancer Research Institute fellowship at the University of California San Francisco. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is deputy director of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, associated faculty member in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and member of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. Toettcher has won several awards, including a National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and being named a Vallee Scholar.