Apr 20, 2026

Sun awarded Robert T. Simpson Graduate Student Award for Innovative Research.

The Graduate Program Core Committee announced that Jiawan Sun has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Robert T. Simpson Graduate Student Award for Innovative Research.

The Graduate Program Core Committee announced that Jiawan Sun has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Robert T. Simpson Graduate Student Award for Innovative Research.

The Robert T. Simpson Award for Innovative Research was established through contributions from Katherine R. Simpson and the sons of Robert T. Simpson. Simpson placed a high value on research that involved significant risk. Examples include a graduate student choosing a risky project over a more certain one and succeeding, pursuing a high-risk side project in addition to an adviser-recommended study, or persuading an adviser to support a risky, student-designed project from the outset. While the award uses the term “innovative,” it is intended to honor students who accepted substantial risk, faced the possibility of failure and its consequences, and ultimately succeeded.

Sun is a fifth-year doctoral student in Santhosh Girirajan’s laboratory, where she studies the genetic mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and intellectual disability. She established technically challenging induced pluripotent stem cell and CRISPR-based models and generated findings that revealed new insights into how copy-number variants and genetic background interact to influence disease outcomes. Her work has opened a new direction for research in the Girirajan lab.

Sun has published a co-first-author paper in Cell and has another first-author paper accepted in Nature Communications. In his nomination letter, Girirajan wrote, “What distinguishes Jiawan most clearly is her willingness to embrace risk and pursue innovative directions in her research.”