Dr. Michael Axtell receives Beckman Young Investigator Award and Searle Scholar Award

Michael Axtell, Assistant Professor of Biology, has received two prestigious honors recently, receiving a Beckman Young Investigator Award and being named a Searle Scholar.

The Beckman Young Investigators Program provides research support to the 16 most promising young faculty members in the early stages of academic careers in the chemical and life sciences each year.

The Searle Scholars Program makes grants to selected universities and research centers to support the independent research of exceptional young faculty in the biomedical sciences and chemistry. The Searle Award is $100,000 per year for three years. Only fifteen awards are made annually to the most outstanding young faculty in the biomedical sciences in the country.

Dr. Axtell plans to use the funds received from these awards to investigate the evolution and function of small regulatory RNAs in plant development. Mosses and flowering plants are separated by nearly half a billion years of evolution and have radically different developmental patterns.  Nonetheless, several regulatory RNAs and their targets have persisted unchanged in both lineages and are likely to regulate developmental processes.  The projects supported by these awards will use genetics and genomics in both mosses and flowering plants to understand the molecular and organismal functions of these extremely conserved regulatory interactions.