Nahum Sonenberg to receive 41st Rosenstiel Award
Nahum Sonenberg, professor of biochemistry at the Goodman Cancer Research Center at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ, has been awarded the 41st Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Science. His research has revolutionized understanding of processes ranging from the response to insulin, cellular development, immunology as well as learning and memory.
Sonenberg is being honored for his transformative studies of the
control of protein synthesis in normal mammalian cells, in virally
infected cells and in cancer cells. He first revealed how messenger
Ï㽶ÊÓƵs (mÏ㽶ÊÓƵs) are selected for protein translation, how this
translation is initiated and how a variety of regulatory factors
control the efficiency of translation. He will present a lecture on
his work at an award ceremony at Brandeis on March 29, 2012.
Sonenberg's wide-ranging investigations have profoundly changed our
understanding of one of the central processes of gene expression
and showed how translational control affects cancer, viral
infection, development and memory.
The Rosenstiel Award was established in 1971 to highlight the
important role educational institutions play in encouraging and
developing basic science as it applies to medicine. Awards are
presented annually to scientists who have made discoveries of
particular originality and importance to basic medical research.
Winners are selected by a panel of scientists assembled by the
Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis. Over
the decades, more than two dozen Rosenstiel winners have gone on to
win the Nobel Prize.
Since the Rosenstiel Center was established in 1968, Brandeis
has placed great emphasis on basic science and its relationship to
medicine. The Rosenstiel Awards are viewed as a means of extending
the center's support beyond the campus community.
Recent previous awardees includeÌýC. David Allis
andÌýMichael Grunstein, two innovative scientists who
established the key molecular connections between histones, histone
modifications and chromatin structure and their effect on the
regulation of gene transcription (2011);ÌýJules Hoffman
andÌýRuslan Medzhitov for their pioneering studies of innate
immunity (2010) and John Gurdon, Irving Weissman and Shinya
Yamanaka for their work on reprogramming differentiated cells into
stem cells (2009). View a list ofÌý.
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