Mandë Holford

Dr. Mandë Holford is as an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine. Her joint appointments reflect her interdisciplinary research, which goes from mollusks to medicine, combining chemistry and biology to discover, characterize, and deliver novel peptides from venomous marine snails as tools for manipulating cellular physiology in pain and cancer. Her laboratory investigates the power of venom to transform organisms and lives when it is adapted to create novel therapeutics for treating human diseases and disorders.

In 2023, Mandë co-founded 2030STEM, founded on the principle that Black, Latino/a/X, Indigenous and people of color need to be fully represented across all disciplines and visible in leadership across STEM sectors and industry corner offices. By addressing systemic barriers in institutional structures and funding mechanisms required to diversify the current STEM population, 2030STEM provides early and mid-career professionals from underrepresented groups with a platform to amplify their perspectives and leadership through salons, publicly available white papers and a fellowship program.

Mandë is actively involved in science education, advancing the public understanding of science, and science diplomacy. She is cofounder of Killer Snails LLC, an award winning EdTech company that uses tabletop, digital, and XR games about extreme creatures in nature, like snails that eat fish, as a conduit to advance scientific learning in K-12 classrooms. She codeveloped a premier Science Diplomacy course at The Rockefeller University to encourage early career scientists to think globally about the impacts of their research as it pertains to international relations and the transdisciplinary and transboundary challenges we have to tackle.

Mandë’s awards include a 2023 National Institutes of Health Common Fund Pioneer Award for her “trailblazing research exploring the therapeutic opportunities and properties of venoms from cephalopods and other marine mollusks.” She was named a 2020 Sustainability Pioneer and a 2015 New Champion Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, a California Academy of Sciences Fellow, the prestigious Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and honored as a Breakthrough Women in Science by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and NPR’s Science Friday. Mandë is a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow.