The story of Clustal: democratising sequence alignments
Desmond Higgins, 2023 Lennart Philipson Award winner, discusses his time at EMBL and his research developing sequence alignment tools.
The work and excellence of EMBL researchers have been recognised with multiple awards and honours during the past six months.
Alexander Aulehla, Head of Developmental Biology Unit, and Mikhail Savitski, Team Leader and Head of Proteomics Core Facility at EMBL Heidelberg, have received Allen Distinguished Investigator awards this year for a project to study differences in protein ageing and lifespan. Funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the awards support cutting-edge, early-stage research projects that promise to advance the fields of biology and medicine.
Alba Diz-Muñoz, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, won the 2023 Early Career Award in Mechanobiology from the US Biophysical Society (BPS). The award recognises a young principal investigator who has made outstanding contributions to the way we understand how mechanics shape molecular and cellular processes.
Olivier Duss, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, is one of the recipients of the FEBS Excellence Awards from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS). The prestigious programme supports early-career group leaders in molecular life sciences.
Miki Ebisuya, Group Leader at EMBL Barcelona, has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship by the Humboldt Foundation. The professorship, one of Germany’s foremost research awards, aims to bring top international researchers from all disciplines to German universities.
Anne Ephrussi, Senior Scientist and Head of EICAT, has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Developmental Biology. The award recognises her fundamental research contributions to our understanding of RNA localisation and translation in development.
Jamie Hackett, Group Leader at EMBL Rome, won the first GSK-EMBL Young Entrepreneur Award for his research on precise epigenome modifications for regulating genes. The award by EMBLEM and GSK supports EMBL scientists in testing the commercial viability of early research work.
Edith Heard, EMBL Director General, has been elected member of the French Academy of Sciences (Académie des Sciences – Institut de France), under the section ‘Human Biology and Medical Sciences’, for her work on epigenetics, particularly in deciphering the process of X-chromosome inactivation. In addition to providing policymakers with a framework of expertise, the academy supports research, science education, and scientific life at the international level.
John Lees, Group Leader, and Joel Hellewell, postdoctoral fellow in the Lees Group at EMBL-EBI, have received the SPI-M-O Award for Modelling and Data Support (SAMDS) from the British government, in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O) and the scientific advice which has supported the government’s response to the pandemic.
Jonas Tholen, postdoctoral fellow in the Galej Group at EMBL Grenoble, is the graduate student winner of the 2023 Scaringe Young Scientist Award from the RNA Society. Open to all junior scientists from all regions of the world, the award recognises the winners’ achievements in RNA research and encourages them to pursue a career in the field of RNA.
Nassos Typas, Group Leader and Senior Scientist at EMBL Heidelberg, has been awarded the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences 2022 from the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. Each year, this prize is given to a European young researcher for their outstanding work and contribution to the scientific community.
