Meet the 2025 Incyte Vitiligo Awards Recipients—and the Work They’re Doing
Today, there are more resources and support for those living with this condition than ever before. If you’ve lived with vitiligo for a while, you’ve likely felt this change—built slowly, over decades, by the patient advocates, researchers, dermatologists and companies behind these advancements. It’s exciting. And yet, there is still more work to do, because there are still significant unmet needs for vitiligo across treatment, insurance, mental health, social awareness and more.
Incyte, the biopharmaceutical company behind Opzelura, wants to recognize the people doing this work, and help fund the programs that can fill these gaps. It launched its vitiligo awards program in 2022 to do just that. The program includes two awards—the Incyte Ingenuity Awards in Vitiligo™ (IIA) and the Vitiligo Innovators Program™ (VIP)—with submissions open each year for review and selection by a panel of independent judges including dermatologists and patient advocates.
Each year, Incyte announces the award recipients at World Vitiligo Day-USA in late June—an opportunity to recognize the people and programs driving innovation for vitiligo in front of the very people they support.
Here’s a look at the 2025 recipients and some of the exciting work being done to fill the unmet needs of those living with vitiligo.
IIA’s 2025 Recipients
IIA supports “innovative initiatives that address the specific needs of people impacted by vitiligo, including patients, caregivers and their healthcare providers, through thoughtful, creative and original approaches.” These awards fund two initiatives, awarding up to $35,000 and up to $100,000, respectively, to support projects of different scales.
The 2025 recipients are:
$100,000—University of Virginia School of Medicine for VitiliGo Forward. Rishab Revankar, a first-year resident at UVA, is leading a project to enhance clinician education, reduce adolescent stigma and improve access to care for individuals with vitiligo. That last part specifically takes on a problem a lot of us in this community already know intimately: finding a dermatologist with vitiligo experience and understanding of the latest research and treatments. His goal: build a National Vitiligo Care Directory—a centralized, transparent resource showing provider expertise, treatment capabilities, and geographic availability, with the goal of making referrals faster and access more equitable.
$35,000—Grassroots Comedy, for “How Politics Made Me White.” Madinah Wilson-Anton, a stand-up comedian, Delaware elected official, and board chair at Grassroots Comedy, brings her own perspective as a young, Muslim, Black woman with vitiligo to a project built at the intersection of humor, public service, and social justice. Alongside Chris Blackwood, founder and executive director of Grassroots Comedy, the two are building a 2–3 minute sizzle reel that blends comedy, political commentary, and personal storytelling to take on vitiligo’s emotional and psychological weight—not just the visible part.
The goal is distribution across multiple outlets, with an ambitious eye toward a major streaming platform pickup. But the deeper hope is about representation itself: Grassroots Comedy wants children and adults with vitiligo and other visible differences to feel less alone, and to see a future where vitiligo shows up in media as one part of a person rather than the whole story—where the personality gets to lead.
VIP’s 2025 Recipients
VIP recognizes individuals who have dedicated themselves to having a positive impact on the vitiligo community through extraordinary care, education or research advances. Each year, there are three recipients, with one from each of these categories: healthcare innovator (i.e. biologic coordinator, nurse, PA or physician), rising innovator (resident, medical student or researcher), and community innovator (advocate or non-medical individual).
The 2025 recipients are:
Healthcare Innovator—John Harris, MD, PhD, Chair of Dermatology at Mass General Brigham and Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School, founding director of the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center and the Autoimmune Therapeutics Institute. Harris’s path into vitiligo research started with his cousin’s type 1 diabetes and a patient in medical school who had vitiligo alongside three other autoimmune conditions—which is what convinced him vitiligo was worth understanding on its own terms. His lab helped establish the role of interferon-γ signaling in the disease, work that contributed to the first FDA-approved treatment to restore pigmentation, and has since identified IL-15 signaling as a key driver of disease persistence—research that’s laid the groundwork for newer therapies now in clinical studies.
Getting there wasn’t a straight line. “I submitted eight grant applications before I finally got one to study vitiligo,” Harris says, recalling reviewers who told him there was no evidence the immune system caused the disease in the first place. He’s since authored more than 200 publications and been recognized with honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation—but he’s just as direct about what hasn’t changed: “The stigma’s baked in. It’s actually written in ancient Indian medical texts… it’s not easy to change.” His goal, in his own words: “not to retire until we have a cure.”
Watch Harris’ award interview.
Community Innovator—Yan Valle, founder and CEO of the Vitiligo Research Foundation (VRF), a global nonprofit advancing vitiligo awareness, research, and patient empowerment. Valle has spent decades uniting patients, clinicians, researchers, and advocacy organizations worldwide, and is a driving force behind World Vitiligo Day—which he helped grow from a small gathering in Rome into a global initiative that has reached 120 million views over the past 15 years. His own vitiligo showed up when he was young, in the 1970s and ’80s—a stretch of time, and a place, with little language for it. “Everybody was thinking that I got burned,” he says, and for years he went along with that rather than explain otherwise, until the depigmentation reached his neck and face and became harder to hide.
“The Vitiligo Research Foundation puts patients at the center of everything we do,” Valle says. “We give them tools to better understand their disease and their options.” One project he points to specifically: the Vitiligo Patient Journey Map, built to lay out treatment options clearly, start to finish.
Watch Valle’s award interview.
Rising Innovator—Kristin Tissera, MD, a recent graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and current preliminary year intern at Massachusetts General Hospital, recognized for research and advocacy work early in her career that’s already amplified the voices of people living with vitiligo day to day. Tissera’s connection to vitiligo is personal—her paternal grandmother in Sri Lanka started to lose pigment around age 40, in a culture where the condition carried real social stigma. Today, her work includes an award-winning undergraduate thesis in anthropology examining how losing pigment shapes identity for people of color, a Fulbright Research Scholarship studying pigmentation biology in Singapore, and peer-reviewed publications on pediatric vitiligo comorbidities.
For seven years, she’s also been a volunteer and leader with VITfriends—helping build inclusive educational programs and hosting the organization’s Vitiligo Medical podcast to get accurate, accessible information to patients and families.
Watch Tissera’s award interview.
Why these awards matter
These aren’t just awards—this is the future of vitiligo care and support in the making.
The IIA awards unlock the opportunity for resources and programs that didn’t exist before and tackle real-world challenges for those living with vitiligo. A comedy project with the potential to create representation on platforms most of us actually watch? A directory that shortens the search for the right dermatologist? These are both new ways of solving real needs across representation and healthcare support.
The VIP awards recognize some of the individuals at the forefront of the existing innovations in vitiligo and create a moment to celebrate their dedication. This matters too, because their efforts are changing the future for those living with this condition—whether it’s new research, new awareness campaigns, or new events that bring people together from around the globe for a common purpose: to talk about vitiligo.
This work is innovative—but so is this program, and that’s worth noting too. In his award interview, Yan shared: “I think the Vitiligo Innovators Program is unique. I’ve never seen anything like this in vitiligo or other fields—basically recognizing the community effort and those professional efforts that are outside of the pharmaceutical industry.” It’s a nod to the way Incyte is changing the way pharmaceutical companies engage with and support patient and healthcare communities—and it’s noteworthy. (Thanks, Incyte.)
The 2026 awards cycle is now open
Incyte’s 2026 vitiligo awards program is now open—which means you can submit applications for IIA and nominations for VIP now through October 29th, 2026. It’s also worth noting—while VIP will continue after this year, this is the final year for the IIA program.
To learn more and submit your application or nomination, visit https://www.incyteingenuityawards.com/.
This piece is part of a series from Living Dappled’s coverage of WVD-USA, hosted by the Global Vitiligo Foundation.
Disclosure: Erika Page is a paid judge on the IIA/VIP judging panel. Living Dappled also has a paid partnership with Incyte to promote the 2026 awards. Living Dappled has not been compensated for this blog post.
