Ragon faculty members Drs. Alejandro Balaz and Daniel Lingwood have been awarded this year’s prestigious Milton Fund award.

The Harvard University William F. Milton Fund grants often fill gaps in funding. The fund, which is open to Harvard faculty members, funds new and original projects in the fields of medicine, geography, history, and science. The winning projects must either promote the physical and material welfare of the human race or investigate and determine the value and importance of a discovery or invention.

“The Milton award will provide crucial support to our project focused on the evolution of HIV undergoing selective pressure by broadly neutralizing antibodies,” says Dr. Balaz.

Said Dr. Lingwood, “With the Milton fund we are planning to engineer a humanized mouse that will allow us to define the contribution of individual B cell receptor sequences to the development of neutralizing HIV responses, and in so doing, define new vaccine templates for this virus.

The William F. Milton Fund, established in 1924, is one of the oldest existing bequests made to Harvard University.