Jaffrey wins Abel Award
Dr. Samie Jaffrey
Dr. Samie Jaffrey, the Greenberg-Starr Professor and a professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received the 2017 John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
The Abel Award is named after John J. Abel, who founded the society in 1946 to encourage young investigators to conduct fundamental research in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. The society recognized Dr. Jaffrey for his innovative research and development of new technologies that have fostered discoveries into how Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) is regulated to control gene expression in health and disease.
Dr. Jaffrey will accept the Abel Award during the society’s annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2017 on April 22 in Chicago, and will deliver the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology Lecture titled “The Dynamic Epitranscriptome: Encoding the Fate and Function of mRNA with Reversible Nucleotide Modifications.”
“I am honored to receive this award, which would not have been possible without the truly outstanding Weill Cornell Medicine postdocs and graduate students who I have had the pleasure to work with,” Dr. Jaffrey said.
Dr. Jaffrey’s work has fundamentally advanced scientists’ understanding of RNA biology and gene regulation. Most recently, he has helped to launch the field of “epitranscriptomics,” which has revealed that mRNA contains diverse nucleotide modifications that affect its fate and function in cells. As a result of Dr. Jaffrey’s studies, epitranscriptomics is a rapidly developing area of molecular biology that is transforming the understanding of gene regulation in normal and disease states.
The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics is a 5,000 member scientific society whose members conduct basic and clinical pharmacological research within the academic, industrial and government sectors. Its members strive to discover and develop new medicines and therapeutic agents that fight existing and emerging diseases.