2021 RNA Society/Scaringe Graduate Student Award Winners
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The RNA Society is excited to share news of the winners of the 2021 RNA Society/Scaringe Graduate Student Award. This year we have two well-deserving awardees – Januka Athukoralage and Jonathan Bohlen.

2021 RNA Society/Scaringe Graduate Student Award

Januka Athukoralage is a graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Malcolm White at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Januka performs research on the prokaryotic immune signaling pathways used to evade viral infection.  In particular, he studies cyclic nucleotide signaling by type III CRISPR-Cas systems in response to viral infection. He discovered cellular enzymes that degrade cyclic nucleotides in order to regulate the immune response and then viral enzymes that degrade cyclic nucleotides to circumvent CRISPR immunity. His work is paving the way to improve bacteriophage therapies targeting human pathogens. He has been a member of the RNA Society since 2019.

Jonathan Bohlen is a graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Aurelio Teleman at the German Cancer Research Center (DFKZ) in Heidelberg. Jonathan investigates regulation of protein synthesis using high-throughput methods that reveal the mechanistic steps of translation initiation. He has gained insights into translation reinitiation and how this relates to cancer cell adaptation in the tumor.  Jonathan discovered that translation initiation factors still reside on the ribosome after translation of short upstream open-reading frames, allowing it to return to scanning mode. He has been a member of the RNA Society since 2020.

Please congratulate Junuka and Jonathan for their research achievements and be sure to view the presentations of their award-winning work at the 2021 RNA Society Annual Meeting in June.