Gail A. Cornwall, Ph.D., a professor at the School of Medicine Department of Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC), received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award from the NIH Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program . Cornwall is one of only six researchers in the United States to earn the award in the 2026 grant cycle.
“The impact and prestige of Dr. Cornwall’s grant from the NIH Office of the Director is evidenced not only by the small number of grants funded in this category — only six from across the U.S. — but also by the quality of the competition,” Lance R. McMahon, Ph.D., TTUHSC executive vice president for Research and Innovation, said. “The other receiving institutions included Cornell, Stanford and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. This achievement is truly remarkable and a testament to the faculty talent and innovative research at TTUHSC.”
The High-Risk, High-Reward Research program supports exceptionally creative scientists pursuing highly innovative research with the potential for broad impact in biomedical, behavioral or social sciences within the NIH mission. Cornwall received $2.9 million to fund her research, “Protein-Based Inheritance in Mammals.”
Cornwall’s research focuses on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Studies support the idea that environmental stress can alter a father's sperm and affect the traits of future generations. However, the epigenetic carrier in the germline is still unknown.
Cornwall introduced a groundbreaking idea for how this occurs. She suggests that tiny cellular structures — called germ granules — act as information carriers. Specifically, Cornwall theorizes that environmentally sensitive proteins — amyloids — within the germ granules encode information in their structure and pass it on to future generations, including to those who were never directly exposed to the environmental stress.
Her work is distinct from other epigenetic studies in that she proposes that cytoplasmic proteins are the information carriers rather than genomic material (DNA/RNA).
“We think it’s a mechanism by which nature has developed a way for an organism to beta test a new phenotype (characteristic or trait) before hardwiring it by a change in DNA sequence (genetic change),” Cornwall said. “From a cell standpoint, it’s evolution. It’s just changing to adapt to the environment. But for the organism, it can result in a disease.”
Cornwall added that there are many instances in the human population where newly acquired traits can’t be explained by genetic changes.
“If we can prove that protein-based inheritance happens in mammals, it would be a new epigenetic mechanism for how traits are acquired and reveal the profound influence the environment can have on human health and the developmental origins of disease,” Cornwall said.
NIH Director's Transformative Research Awards are intended to provide funding to initiate important new directions in research over a five-year period.