News

Dr. Sharon Long Awarded the 2026 International Prize for Biology

Dr. Long receives the Prize in recognition of her pioneering contributions to our understanding of plant–microbe symbiosis, particularly the molecular interactions between legumes and rhizobia.

Bacterial Immune Proteins Converge on a Virus's DNA Packaging Motor

A paper in Nature Communications by Gao lab members (Simone Evans, Collin Chiu) with collaborators at Stanford and MIT shows how two distinct bacterial immune sensors use unexpected molecular mechanisms to detect the DNA packaging motor of bacterial viruses.

Stephen Chang Receives Three Career Development Awards

Cardiologist Stephen Chang, MD, PhD (Krasnow Lab), has received three major awards supporting early-career physician-scientists: an American Heart Association Career Development Award (2026-29), an NIH NHLBI K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award (2026-31), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists (2026-31).

Gao Lab Discovers Bacterial Surveillance System that Detects Most of a Virus’s Core Machinery

A paper in Nature from Gao lab members (Hyunbin Lee, Sofia Luengo-Woods) with collaborators at Stanford and the NIH reveals that bacteria have a surprisingly comprehensive alarm system, with distinct families of intracellular receptors that together keep watch on nearly every essential part of an invading virus.

Junyi Chen Receives National Cancer Center Fellowship

Junyi (Xiao Lab) has received a prestigious 2026–27 National Cancer Center Research Fellowship to support her project, “Targeting Cysteine Catabolism to Induce Ferroptosis in Liver Cancer.” Her research focuses on a newly identified protein regulator of intracellular cysteine levels, with the goal of developing small-molecule strategies to restrict cysteine availability and trigger liver cancer cell death.

Rohatgi Lab Identifies a Signaling Mechanism that Drives Colorectal Cancer

In a new paper in Nature Genetics, Ganesh Pusapati and colleagues in the Rohatgi lab used base editing enabled scanning mutagenesis to show that the WNT master regulator β-catenin scaffolds the very destruction complex that degrades it WNT-driven cancers.

Dr. Dan Herschlag Receives 2026 BMS Award in Enzyme Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Recognized for his transformative contributions to RNA and protein worlds, as well as his outstanding mentorship, Dr. Daniel (Dan) Herschlag will be honored with a symposium at the Spring 2027 ACS National Meeting.

In Memoriam: Remembering Bob Lehman, Our Biochemistry Department Founding Faculty

Bob Lehman was one of the 6 founding members of the biochemistry department. Joined by Arthur Kornberg, Paul Berg, Buzz Baldwin, Dale Kaiser, and Dave Hogness, Bob and his colleagues established the department in 1959 and built it into an extraordinary scientific enterprise.

Dr. Haopeng Xiao Named 2026 Rita Allen Foundation Scholar

Dr. Xiao joins the 2026 class of Rita Allen Foundation Scholars, celebrating seven early-career leaders in the biomedical sciences whose research holds exceptional promise for revealing new pathways to advance human health.

Annie Trinh Receives 2026 Postdoctoral Enrichment Program Award

The Postdoctoral Enrichment Program is designed to help promising postdoctoral fellows maximize their professional potential by supporting activities that extend beyond the scope of traditional training grants and enhance their research careers.

Rohatgi Lab Discovers a Unique Search-and-Destroy Strategy for Signaling Receptors

In a new paper in Molecular Cell, the Rohatgi lab, with collaborators at Oxford, describes the structure and mechanism of a membrane machine that targets and destroys cell surface receptors that play key roles in development, cancer, immunity, and obesity.

Herschlag Lab Alum Shu-ou Shan Inducted into National Academy of Sciences

Herschlag Lab alum, Shu-ou Shan, PhD, who is now the Altair Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Caltech, advances our understanding of protein biogenesis—from nascent chain selection at the ribosome to folding, localization, modification and quality control.

Hannah Barsouk Receives 2026 Hertz Fellowship

One of our newest graduate students, Hannah Barsouk, is one of the recipients of the nation’s most competitive doctoral fellowship in science and technology.