2021 RNA Society Early- and Mid-Career Award Winners
Posted on December 6, 2020

The RNA Society is delighted to announce the winners of our 2021 Early- and Mid-Career Research Awards. Please join us in congratulating Schraga Schwartz and Ling-Ling Chen for being selected to receive these esteemed awards and for their exceptional research achievements. Please also look for their award presentations detailing their work at the 2021 RNA Society Annual Meeting, which will be held virtually next June. 

2021 Early-Career Research Award 

Schraga Schwartz, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is the recipient of this year's Early-Career Research Award. Schraga obtained a B.Sc. in Medicine from Tel-Aviv University, where he also carried out PhD work with Gil Ast on the role of chromatin organization on splicing via exon/intron architecture. For his postdoctoral studies, first with Rotem Sorek at the Weizmann and then with Aviv Regev and Eric Lander at the Broad Institute, where he worked on transcriptome-wide maps of RNA modifications. After returning to Israel in 2015, supported by European Research Council and EMBO Young Investigator Awards, his group has developed accurate, high-resolution methods for antibody-independent detection of post-transcriptional RNA modifications. His group’s investigations in the biological functions of RNA modifications in bacteria, yeast and mammals have substantially changed our understanding of the importance of epitranscriptomics on RNA metabolism, revealing compelling and elegant examples. He was nominated by Ramesh Pillai.

2021 Mid-Career Research Award

Ling-Ling Chen from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, is the recipient of this year's Mid-Career Research Award. After studies of Biology and Pharmacology in Lanzhou and Shanghai, Ling-Ling did her PhD with Gordon Carmichael at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where she became interested in the function of non-coding RNAs. She returned to Shanghai in 2011 as Principal Investigator and is currently Associate Director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology at SIBCB. Her lab has made important contributions to our understanding of the biogenesis of circular RNAs and their impact on innate immunity and autoimmune disease, the discovery of snoRNA-related lncRNAs and the function and assembly of RNA-related nuclear bodies. She is a generous contributor to the scientific community, serving as organizer of Keystone Symposia, Cold Spring Harbor Meetings and of the 2020 RNA Society Annual Meeting, and as Board Member of the Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as well as of the Chinese Biological Investigations Society. She also served in the RNA Society Nominations Committee and currently serves in the Meetings Committee. Ling-Ling is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Research Scholar. She was nominated by Lynne Maquat.