Citation for Stacey Gabriel

Stacey Gabriel. Geneticist. Technology developer. COVID hero.

In the whirlwind early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Senior Director of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, you understood instantly that the availability of rapid, wide scale testing and screening would be critical to controlling the spread of the virus and saving countless lives. So you got to work, leading the development and execution of a diagnostic testing lab that got stood up within two weeks and that quickly became the largest testing lab in New England, a model for and principal contributor to national testing procedure and epidemiological study, and a key surveillance tool that will transform the science and practice of disease surveillance for generations to come.

In fact, it’s safe to say that the habit of routine and casual testing that so many of us have integrated into their lives – and that is so critical to understanding and controlling the spread of COVID — is largely the result of the fast, accessible, and no- or low-cost testing science and methodology that you and the team you led at the Broad Institute created and perfected. You reached and eventually met your goal of testing more than 100,000 people a day and performing many millions of tests over the course of the pandemic — an unprecedented outcome that many early on told you would not be possible.

But you were used to that. As the Boston Globe explained when honoring you as a 2020 Bostonian of the Year, you “had developed a reputation for being unafraid to take on seemingly impossible challenges — and managing to deliver.” Whether becoming the first in your family to go to college, let alone graduate school; convincing one of the world’s leading scientists to hire you as a research scientist even though you hadn’t gotten a post-doc; or providing research on genetic variation that laid much of the foundation for an international gene mapping project, you have continually ignored the boundaries you’ve been told were impossible to cross.

You published 23 of the world’s most highly cited scientific research papers in 2013, more than anyone alive — earning you Thomson Reuters’ annual “hottest researcher” honor. And you remain at the forefront of uncovering the mysteries in our gene codes that will pave the way toward combating the world’s deadliest diseases.

Stacey Gabriel — for establishing disease sequence technology and surveillance systems that will forever keep populations healthier; for demonstrating both scientific leadership and collaboration with researchers around the world; and for confidently and heroically tearing down walls for women in science, it is my honor to present you with a 2022 Barnard Medal of Distinction.