Longtime RNA Society Member Dan Herschlag honored with the Protein Society Stein & Moore Award
Posted on April 19, 2022

April 4, 2022 Press Release from the Protein Society: The 2022 recipient of the Stein & Moore Award presented by the Protein Society is Stanford University Professor, Daniel Herschlag. Dr. Herschlag’s distinctive style of scientific inquiry, applying fundamental chemical, biophysical and enzymological principles to long-standing and emerging questions in protein science and biology, has borne fruit in numerous ways. In protein enzymology, Dr. Herschlag identified the principle of “catalytic promiscuity," a critical missing link in evolution and a foundation for the fertile area of directed evolution. His group has provided deep and extensive dissections of hydrogen bonds and their contributions to enzyme catalysis. In the field of protein-RNA interactions, the Herschlag lab developed the RNA chaperone hypothesis, presaging the discovery of cellular RNA chaperones and the appreciation of their widespread importance. He demonstrated the ubiquitous role of RNA binding proteins in coordinating gene expression. Most recently, he has elevated our previously qualitative and descriptive understanding of protein-RNA recognition to a higher—quantitative and predictive—plane and expanded the scale of biochemical characterization of enzymes from a few enzymes to thousands of variants in parallel. Through his desire to answer deep fundamental questions, Professor Daniel Herschlag has been on the frontier of developing and applying cutting edge techniques and concepts that illuminate new aspects of protein behavior and their biological consequences.

The Stein & Moore Award is sponsored by The Protein Society with support from Wiley and is named for Nobel laureates Dr. William Stein and Dr. Stanford Moore. The award recognizes eminent leaders in protein science who have made sustained high impact research contributions to the field.