Sarah Assmann Awarded the Masatoshi Nei Innovation Prize in Biology
Sarah Assmann, Waller Professor of Plant Biology at Penn State, has been awarded the Masatoshi Nei Innovation Prize in Biology. The award was established through a generous gift from Masatoshi Nei, professor emeritus of biology at Penn State, Laura Carnell, professor of biology at Temple University and Nei’s wife, Nobuko Nei. The prize is intended to recognize a preeminent scientist who is on the faculty at Penn State, is an innovator in their field and has achieved outstanding scientific research and leadership in the biological sciences.
Assmann will be presented with the prize and give a lecture, titled “RNA Biology, Food Security, and Revisiting the Myth of Sisyphus,” from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library, on the Penn State University Park campus.
“Sarah has been a dedicated member of our department for over 30 years, and her research and mentorship have been invaluable,” said Elizabeth McGraw, professor and department head of biology. “She has made a significant impact in the field of plant biology, from her undergraduate years at Williams College to her career at Penn State.”
Assmann’s current research explores the various ways — molecular, genetic and cellular — that plants detect and survive drought and temperature stress. Her work focuses on two key areas: the role of a type of signaling molecules known as heterotrimeric G proteins, which help plants respond to stress, and how RNA structure act as a signal in living cells to sense and assist with plant responses to environmental challenges.
Assmann earned her doctoral degree in biology from Stanford University in 1986 and her bachelor’s degree in biology from Williams College in 1980. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Riverside then joined the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University in 1987, where she established her independent research program studying plant responses to environmental signals.
In 1993, Assmann joined the Penn State Department of Biology as an associate professor, became a full professor in 1997, and has held the Waller Chair since 2001. She is a former president of the American Society of Plant Biologists and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her estimated 200 scientific articles have been cited more than 25,000 times, and she has mentored over 50 undergraduate and doctoral students, and postdoctoral scholars.
Masatoshi Nei was Evan Pugh Professor of Biology from 1994 to 2015 and director of the Institute for Molecular Evolutionary Genetics from 1990 to 2015 at Penn State. He constructed a mathematical theory for studying the evolutionary relationships of different species using molecular data. A statistic named for him, Nei's genetic distance, is a cornerstone of population genetics analyses. This measure makes it possible to estimate the origins of populations and the times of their divergence from common ancestors. Nei applied this technique to human populations and obtained the first evidence pointing to the African origins of modern humans. His influential paper on the "neighbor-joining" method of constructing phylogenetic trees is one of the most highly cited papers in the entire field of biology. Nei and his group have also written and distributed software packages, including MEGA for molecular evolutionary genetics analysis, which is the most widely used software for phylogenetic analysis at present.