#  Dr. Sophia Z. Shalhout Presented Sandy and Herb Pollack Young Investigator Award 

 





December 15, 2025

 

 

   ![Dr. Shalhout Presented Pollack Award ](/sites/g/files/omnuum8391/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-12/Dr.%20Shalhout%20Presented%20Award.jpg?itok=RVYg5VrX) 

 

Congratulations to [Sophia Z. Shalhout, PhD,](https://researchers.masseyeandear.org/details/531/sophia-sophia_z_shalhout-shalhout) Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School, who was presented with the Sandy and Herb Pollack Young Investigator Award at the 2025 Mass Eye and Ear Annual Meeting of Trustees and Medical Staff. Dr. Shalhout, the fifth recipient of this honor, is a Principal Investigator in the Mike Toth Head and Neck Cancer Research Center at Mass Eye and Ear.

Endowed by former Mass Eye and Ear Board Member and Trustee Herb Pollack and his wife Sandy, this award was established to provide financial support for promising young faculty-scientists. Herb and Sandy’s daughter, Jill Kutchin, and son-in-law, Ed Kutchin, attended the annual meeting and presented the award to Dr. Shalhout. Since 2012, Ed has carried on the Pollack tradition of serving as a Mass Eye and Ear trustee.

Dr. Shalhout earned her PhD in chemistry from Wayne State University and completed wet and dry lab postdoctoral training as a research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. Most recently, before joining the faculty at Mass Eye and Ear, Dr. Shalhout served as a data scientist and the Cutaneous Oncology Research Fellow at Mass General Cancer Center.

Dr. Shalhout draws on her expertise in chemistry, regenerative biology, cancer, and artificial intelligence to lead a lab built on a single principle: every stage of drug discovery can be accelerated with computation. The group integrates large-scale molecular and clinical datasets with models that propose actionable therapeutic strategies. Through end-to-end AI frameworks, the Shalhout Lab accelerates the discovery of new agents for cancer, hearing loss, and other diseases and improves the probability of identifying therapeutics that traditional approaches often miss.

The Pollack Award was accompanied by a generous research grant, which will be utilized to accelerate this work. “Dr. Shalhout’s dedication to advancing this critical research truly reflect the spirit of this award,” said [Mark Varvares, MD, FACS,](https://doctors.masseyeandear.org/details/49) Chair of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Mass General Brigham. “I look forward to seeing how her innovations transform the future of patient care.”



 

 

 



 

 

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