Dr. Mandë Holford is a professor in Chemistry at CUNY Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her joint appointments reflect her interdisciplinary research, which goes from mollusks to medicine, combining Chemistry and Biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. Her laboratory investigates the power of venom to transform organisms and to transform lives when it is adapted to create novel therapeutics for treating human diseases and disorders.
Dr. Holford believes we need a new deal with nature, where we appreciate its intrinsic value and make a serious effort to conserve, protect, and restore as much of what remains and has been lost, and at the same time we understand how nature is essentially tied to our health, agriculture, and economy. According to Dr. Holford, venomous snails can help give us new medicines and new pesticides for agriculture while creating innovations to drive our economy. She has received several awards, including the National Institutes of Health Common Fund Pioneer Award for her trailblazing research exploring the therapeutic opportunities and properties of venoms from cephalopods and other marine mollusks.
Dr. Holford received one of eight Pioneer Awards granted in 2023. The first-ever CUNY researcher selected for the award, Dr. Holford will receive $5.5 million to explore new directions for using cephalopod venoms and their evolutionary dynamics in drug discovery.
Dr. Holford in the lab with students studying marine snails.
She also was named a 2020 Sustainability Pioneer and 2015 New Champion Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, a California Academy of Sciences fellow, the prestigious Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and honored as a Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and NPR’s Science Friday.
Dr. Holford is actively involved in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She is co-founder of Killer Snails, LLC, an award-winning EdTech company that uses tabletop, digital, and XR games about extreme creatures in nature, like snails that eat fish, as a conduit to advance scientific learning in K-12 classrooms. Dr. Holford co-developed a premier Science Diplomacy course at The Rockefeller University to encourage early career scientists to think globally about the effects of their research on international relations and transdisciplinary and transboundary challenges.
Dr. Holford is a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow. Dr. Holford received her PhD in Synthetic Protein Chemistry from The Rockefeller University.