Dr. K. Heran Darwin serves on the board of directors and is the senior advisor for biomedical science at the Vilcek Foundation. In addition to her work with the foundation, Darwin is a professor of microbiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where she leads a research lab at the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences.

Since 2009, Darwin has been a vital part of the Vilcek Foundation’s science prizes and programs, serving as a juror for the Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise Biomedical Science and the Vilcek Foundation Prizes. Darwin continues to work with the foundation’s senior staff to review, consider, and administer the increasing number of applications from qualified candidates each year.

At NYU, Darwin has dedicated her career to the study of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis (TB), the world’s deadliest infectious disease, causing 1.5 million deaths annually. Darwin and her team have characterized a protease complex known as the proteasome in M. tuberculosis; the proteasome is crucial for the bacteria’s ability to cause lethal infections. Her ongoing research aims to understand the proteasome’s functions and pathways, and the relationship between M. tuberculosis and its host, with the goal of identifying new approaches to treat TB.

Her early research was recognized in 2006, when she received the ICAAC Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Microbiology. In 2012 she was named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2016 she was made a Fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology. In 2024, Darwin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Chemistry and Life Sciences. 

In a paper in Open Biology, Darwin and her collaborator Dr. Sarah Stanley proposed the revolutionary “aldehyde hypothesis”. They suggested that aldehydes produced by hosts act as an innate immune defense mechanism against infectious bacteria. Darwin and Stanley’s research links genetic traits associated with aldehyde flush, or “alcohol flush reaction,” as evolutionary traits beneficial for immune defense against pathogens like M. tuberculosis. This theory provides a significant explanation for the association between a mutation in an aldehyde decomposition enzyme, commonly found in individuals of Asian origin and descent, and TB.

Darwin earned her PhD in Salmonella pathogenesis under the mentorship of Professor Virginia Miller at the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed her post-doctoral research in tuberculosis with Professor Carl Nathan at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and joined the faculty of NYU in 2004. Her research is widely published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, mBio, Molecular Microbiology, and Molecular Cell.