Meet 2025 Award Recipient
Lily Cohen
Lily Cohen came to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai from Brown University, where she majored in health and human biology and graduated magna cum laude. She also holds a master’s degree in health, medicine, and society (medical anthropology) from the University of Cambridge.
Lily is an aspiring physician-scientist with work and research experience in health disparities, neuroimmunology, and infectious disease dynamics. She has worked as a research scientist for the Centre for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge and the Task Force for Global Health, and has interned with the U.S. Department of State Office of International Health and Biodefense, the New York City Health and Hospitals Special Pathogens Program, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. She has also collaborated with research scientists in the Viral Emergence (VERENA) Consortium and the National Institutes of Health Fogarty Center’s Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies. Her work has been published in journals such as Nature Microbiology, Nature Ecology & Evolution, PLoS Pathogens, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and The Lancet Microbe. Lily was also inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society in 2025.
Lily would like to thank Drs. Anna Fagre, Cécile Viboud, David Spiro, Sandra Chaves, Colin Carlson, Mercedes Perez, Anna Rommel, and an extended community of research mentors and collaborators—all of whom ground their work in a commitment to public service—for their contributions to this incredible honor.
Lily will graduate with her MD degree and continue pursuing clinical and epidemiological research at the intersection of autoimmunity, infectious disease, neuroimmunology, and mental health.