The Biophysical Society (BPS) has named Professor Juli Feigon its 2019 Founders Award winner.
Feigon will be honored at the Society’s 63rd Annual Meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center on March 5, 2019, during the annual Awards Symposium.
Feigon will be recognized for her courageous and creative work in the structural biology of DNA and RNA, pioneering the use of NMR to study structures and dynamics of nucleic acids; establishing the conformational variability of DNA; folding of RNA; solving the first NMR structures of triplexes, quadruplexes, telomeres; and recent landmark studies on the structure and function of the telomerase complex.
“Sometimes the research community does not immediately understand the immediate impact of a single scientist’s contribution to advancing knowledge in the field,” BPS President Angela Gronenborn, University of Pittsburgh. “The Founders Award allows us to call attention to outstanding achievements in biophysics that are accepted and used by others, either immediately or over a period of years. Juli has consistently carried out outstanding work in structural biology of DNA and RNA and nucleic acid/protein complexes and we are excited to celebrate her contributions to our field.”
The Founders Award is given to scientists for outstanding achievement in any area of biophysics. These achievements are often reflected in the acceptance of and use by others in the field, either promptly or over a period of years.
Feigon received her B.A. from Occidental College and her M.S. and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of California, San Diego where she studied with Professor David Kearns. Her postdoctoral work was completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Fund Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Alexander Rich from 1982-1985. Feigon joined the UCLA faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1985. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and holds the Christopher Foote Term Chair. Feigon is an associate member of the UCLA-DOE Institute of Genomics and Proteomics, a member of the Molecular Biology Institute (MBI), and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). She is a recipient of the Dupont Young Faculty Award, National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, Glenn T. Seaborg Research Award, Herbert Newby McCoy Research Award, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
To learn more about Feigon’s research, visit her group’s website.
