The largest unrestricted cash prize for an early career scientist—$250,000—was awarded Tuesday to ASCB member Michael Rape of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) for his work on ubiquitination in signal transduction. Rape was named the Life Sciences winner of the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists by the New York Academy of Sciences that administered the competition for the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Two other Blavatnik prizes were given in physics and chemistry.
Rape came to the U.S. in 2003 after earning his PhD under Stefan Jentsch at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsfried, Germany, for a postdoc with former ASCB President Marc Kirschner in the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2006, and was named a full professor in 2013, the same year he was made an HHMI investigator. He joined ASCB in 2008.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
