The Rockefeller University

09/09/2026

A new study from Paul Cohen's lab at Rockefeller is featured in The Washington Post today! His work suggests that three minutes of intense exercise may have more beneficial impacts on our physiology and health than 90 minutes of more moderate exertion.

“We know exercise is associated with beneficial health outcomes,” said Paul Cohen, a cardiologist and associate professor of molecular metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York City, who oversaw the new study. “But we don’t have a deep understanding of how that occurs and how different organs signal to one another during and after exercise.”

The scientists found that the blood of people who completed three minutes’ worth of all-out exercise — in 30-second bursts over the course of 23 minutes — teemed afterward with far more molecules associated with health improvements than the blood of people who rode bikes relatively moderately for an hour and a half.

Those molecules may then travel through the blood from one organ to another carrying messages from the muscles, liver, immune cells, intestines or other organs to far-flung tissues such as the brain, body fat or adrenal glands. These messages can spark reactions that may influence and improve health.

A new study found that three minutes of intense exercise floods our blood with molecules linked to better health.

09/08/2026

In 1964, Rockefeller chemist R. Bruce Merrifield published what is still one of the most often-cited papers in scientific history, and one that opened a floodgate of research.

Its subject was peptides, the building blocks of proteins, which play a myriad of roles in the body. They include hormones and neurotransmitters; some have antibiotic or metabolic functions; still others are involved in nutrient absorption. Though their structure is simple to describe—short chains composed of any combination of the 20 amino acids—their synthesis was a painstaking, error-prone procedure well into the 20th century.

Attempts to improve the process had been in the works for decades when Merrifield first came up with the idea for solid-phase peptide synthesis in 1959. He spent the next four years perfecting it.

Ultimately, Merrifield’s method reduced what previously took years to accomplish to a matter of days, and lent itself well to automation. His process was soon adapted for synthesizing DNA, RNA, and carbohydrates, helping drive advances in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and drug development—transforming chemistry from a field capable of analyzing biological molecules into one capable of building them.

Merrifield deliberately chose not to patent the method or the synthesizer he built.

For these achievements, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984.

09/04/2026

"On any given day, depending on the weather, I might work on optimizing an organizational procedure, or I might mow a field. I never know, and that’s the beauty of my job.

I’m Joe Catalfamo and I’m the operations manager at Rockefeller’s Millbrook Field Center. I ensure the place is running smoothly, support the researchers and the staff, and troubleshoot when I need to.

Out of college, I thought I’d take a more conventional path. I worked as an analyst for a while. But it wasn’t fulfilling, and I felt like I was on autopilot. Then I tried out real estate and performing home inspections. In 2019, a friend sent me this opening at Millbrook. At the time, I thought, I’ll just give it a shot. Three years after starting, I moved to be closer to the job.

One big key to our success is how our team here is both easy-going and committed. We work hard overseeing and maintaining six buildings, multiple aviaries, and 1,200 acres of open land—and we genuinely enjoy working together.

It doesn’t hurt that we’re fortunate enough to literally be able to go take a walk in the woods during lunch breaks. I’m biased, but I think this is a special place. There’s a pond and trails—and right now the wildflowers are in bloom. We’re pretty much all nature people up here. Even when there are challenges like figuring out how to help researchers best bear-proof outdoor experiments, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask any of the researchers who come up for retreats or meetings or to do experiments, either out on the grounds or in the wet lab here. This resource contributes a lot to the Rockefeller community."

09/04/2026

09/03/2026

Then and Now: Rockefeller's Junyue Cao! Don't miss this article from The Scientist on how Cao's work on the genomics of aging has evolved.

Over the past four years, his team has improved their single-cell genomic tools to uncover genetic and epigenetic dynamic changes during aging, reframing what scientists know about the process.

Cell biologist Junyue Cao creates high-throughput single-cell methods to explore how aging shapes cells and organisms.

09/02/2026

This review from Rockefeller's Titia de Lange highlights new insights into how attrition guards against , including its role in limiting cell proliferation, the importance of telomere length at birth for lifelong cancer prevention, the mechanisms governing telomere length regulation and how telomerase activation enables malignant cells to bypass this barrier.

In contrast to the popular perception that telomere shortening is harmful, findings demonstrate that normal telomere attrition limits the risk of cancer and suggest that counteracting telomere attrition in healthy individuals (for example, by activating telomerase) could enable tumor outgrowth. Thus, such interventions are best reserved for patients with diseases caused by excessively short telomeres.

Read more in Nature Reviews Genetics:

In this Review, the authors discuss recent data showing that telomere attrition is a powerful tumour-suppressor mechanism that limits the development of a wide variety of human cancers.

09/01/2026

At the height of the COVID pandemic, people living in high-income countries were already receiving their second vaccine doses, before more than 80 percent of those living in low-income countries had received their first.

For Rockefeller's Barry Coller, this disparity reflected a systemic failure. “This was the dataset that got me,” Coller recalls. “Such disparity, when there was the greatest risk of dying. It hit home.”

Funded in part by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Institute for Global Infectious Disease Research, Coller set out to explore how researchers could consider issues such as disease burden, licensing, manufacturing, and implementation from the outset, with the goal of making therapies more affordable and accessible in lower income countries. He is now helping to developing a toolkit to designed to help factor equity and affordability into the earliest stages of biomedical discovery.

Researchers show how the senescent state induced by sarcoma and breast cancer drugs drives inflammation—and how it could be suppressed.

08/31/2026

When Rockefeller’s H. Keffer Hartline began his research into visual processing in the 1930s, little was known about the retina, where cells convert external stimuli into neural signals. Throughout his long career, he would go on to make astounding discoveries about the complex interplay between the eye and the brain.

Fascinated by how organisms sense light, Hartline was drawn to the horseshoe crab’s relatively simple visual system, which includes long, easy-to-isolate optic nerve fibers and large photoreceptors in the retina. Among his many innovations was developing groundbreaking methods and tools for isolating single optic nerve fibers in the horseshoe crab eye and then measuring each one’s voltage—the first such recordings in history. These experiments proved his hypothesis that visual information is relayed to the brain through nerve impulses.

Later, he discovered the nerve fiber network that links photoreceptor cells as well as a key form of communication between them: lateral inhibition, or the ability of an excited neuron to mute the activity of its neighbors. This mechanism heightens the contrast between light and shadow and gives sharper edges to shapes—a fine tuning that occurs before an image is even sent to the brain.

For these and other fundamental insights, Hartline won a Nobel Prize in 1967.

As famed biophysicist Floyd Ratliff, a long-time Rockefeller collaborator, said, ''Hartline's basic studies on the integrative action of the retina provided the foundation for practically every advance in the neurophysiology of vision.''

Indeed, Rockefeller’s ninth president and current Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor Emeritus, Torsten Wiesel, built directly upon Hartline’s concepts in his own work discovering how the brain interprets nerve signals to construct images.

For that research into visual processing, Wiesel won a Nobel Prize in 1981.

08/27/2026

Don't miss Rockefeller's Paul Cohen on NPR Morning Edition!

He discusses his latest work showing that high-intensity training, like sprinting, provokes a remarkably robust response throughout the bloodstream in a way that moderate exercise does not.

It was clear the sprint group had "many, many more changes," explains Cohen. "What we can conclude is that sprinting does have a greater effect on remodeling the molecules in the bloodstream."

Further analysis showed that the proteins that were altered in the sprinters were associated with improved cardiovascular and metabolic health.

Learn more below.

A new study finds that an all-out sprint may have unique benefits when it comes to the proteins and tiny molecules in your bloodstream.

08/25/2026

Rockefeller's Jaejin Kim of the Fuchs lab and Bailey Schultz of the Rock lab have been named Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Fellows! This prestigious fellowship encourages the nation's most promising young scientists to pursue careers in cancer research.

Kim aims to identify the genes and molecular mechanisms underlying tissue memory and to define their consequences for wound repair and tumorigenesis. Identifying the “bad memories” that drive tumorigenesis could open opportunities to selectively erase them—reducing cancer risk without compromising normal regeneration—and may one day help prevent inflammation-linked cancers before they arise.

Schultz is using genome-wide CRISPR-based approaches to identify and study genes that regulate mycobacterial cell growth and division. His work will point to new drug targets and help anticipate possible routes of antibiotic resistance, hopefully leading to new treatments for TB that will ease its burden on cancer patients.

Learn more here: https://bit.ly/4cj7Gby