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Academician Howard Chang Receives the 2018 National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology

Date: 2018-01-25

   The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) awarded the 2018 NAS Award in Molecular Biology to Howard Y. Chang, Academician of Academia Sinica, in recognition of his innovative contributions in genome science.

       This is the second accolade that Dr. Chang has recently received from the collective scientific National Academy of the United States. In October 2017, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) named Dr. Chang as one of its newly elected members for 2017. Both the NAS and the NAM are part of the highest academic institute in U.S., with considerable influence over the nation’s policies in scientific research and technology innovation.

       Dr. Chang's research focuses on noncoding RNAs, genomes, and regenerative medicine. His outstanding contributions in the field of genomics include pioneering methods for identifying key regulators in large-scale transcriptional programs, which have been successfully applied in developmental biology, cancer, and aging studies.

       The National Academy of Sciences recognizes and awards Dr. Chang’s major contributions to genome science including his discovery of a new class of genes called long noncoding RNAs (long ncRNAs or lncRNA), which are pervasive in the human genome. Long noncoding RNAs are important causes of cancer metastasis and other human diseases and also play key roles in development and aging.

       In addition, numerous discoveries would not have been possible without Dr. Chang’s invention of new genomic technologies such as ATAC-seq (Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing) and ChIRP-seq (Chromatin Isolation by RNA purification). ATAC-seq in particular has revolutionized the field of epigenetics, improving the ability to map active DNA elements by 1 million-fold in sensitivity and 100-fold in speed. Dr. Chang’s genomic technologies have already been widely adopted by investigators in thousands of labs around the world.

       Dr. Chang is a Professor of Dermatology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Director of the NIH Center of Excellence in Genomic Science: Center for Personal Dynamic Regulome (CEGS) at Stanford University. He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine in the College of Medicine at the National Taiwan University. In 2016, he was elected as an Academician of Academia Sinica and currently serves on the Academic Advisory Committee for the Institute of Molecular Biology.

       Awarded annually to only one exceptional scientist, the NAS Award in Molecular Biology was established in 1962. Over the past five decades, this award has continued to recognize and encourage many outstanding young biologists. Of the 56 awardees to date, 14 have gone on to become Nobel Prize laureates. The 2018 NAS Award in Molecular Biology will be presented during the 155th NAS Annual Meeting held on Sunday, April 29, 2018.

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