Julia Mahamid receives EMBO Gold Medal 2023
She is recognized for her exceptional achievements in structural cell biology and developing powerful techniques that visualize cellular machinery in situ
6 June 2023 – EMBO announces that structural biologist Julia Mahamid is the recipient of this year’s EMBO Gold Medal. Each year, EMBO recognizes a scientist under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to the life sciences in Europe with this award. The awardee, who must work in an EMBC Member State, receives a medal and a bursary of 10,000 euros.
Mahamid, a group leader and senior scientist at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany, receives the award for her seminal research in structural and cell biology that is based on new methods for cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) she established with her group and collaborators. Cryo-ET is a technique for 3D imaging of the unperturbed cellular machinery with high resolution. Mahamid was central in developing cryo-focussed ion beam (cryo-FIB) that opened “electron-transparent windows” into cells, allowing observation of cellular structures and macromolecular complexes in their native environment. In her recent research, Mahamid resolved both the structure of translating ribosomes in motion and that of the expressome, a complex that couples transcription and translation in bacteria.
EMBO Member Patrick Cramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Goettingen, Germany, and President-elect of the Max Planck Society, comments: “Julia Mahamid is the star of in situ structural biology in her generation. She has, at an early age, already gained a very high international reputation. Julia has shown that it is now possible to analyze three-dimensional structures in cells at a level of detail that reveals mechanistic insights. Recently, she extended her work to the demonstration that conformational movement can be observed directly by comparing structures in cells. This is a dream that came true for any cell biologist.”
Mahamid not only uses the new techniques to address her own research questions but also makes them available to the European life sciences community, regularly sharing her expertise and training other scientists in their use.
EMBO Member Christoph W. Müller, Head of Structural and Computational Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg, says: “Despite her young age, Julia Mahamid has established herself as one of the world leaders in in situ structural biology. She not only promotes in situ structural biology in Europe and worldwide, but also teaches and educates the research community, generously sharing her insights and experience, and enabling and supporting many groups in Europe and beyond to establish cryo-FIB/cryo-ET workflows in their own institutes.”
The recipient of the EMBO Gold Medal will give the award lecture at Cell Bio 2023, the ASCB | EMBO meeting that will take place in Boston, MA, USA, from 2 to 6 December 2023.
INFORMATION FOR EDITORS
Biosketch
Julia Mahamid studied biology at the Technion, Haifa, Israel, and transitioned into structural chemistry for her master’s and PhD studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. Supported by EMBO and Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Germany, she contributed to the advancement of cryo-FIB lamellae preparations and their synergy with cryo-EM imaging. She spearheaded the development of 3D cryo-correlative confocal fluorescence microscopy for site-specific preparations and pioneered cryo-FIB lift-out for visual proteomics in multicellular specimens.
Since 2017 Mahamid has been an independent group leader, and since 2021 also a senior scientist, at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany. Her international and interdisciplinary team develops cryo-ET to achieve unprecedented resolution and insights into complex biology, and to establish the method as key technology for structural cell biology. Her research advances understanding of the structure of cellular condensates and applies visual proteomics by developing combinations of cryo-ET, cryo-super-resolution light microscopy and machine learning-assisted data methods in collaboration with colleagues at EMBL.
Mahamid is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Structural Biology. She received the Early Excellence in Science Award 2020 of the Bayer Foundation in the biology category, the Ernst Ruska Prize 2021 of the German Society for Electron Microscopy and the Frankfurter Biophysik-Preis 2022 of the Oswalt-Stiftung.
About EMBO
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Originalpublikation:
https://www.embo.org/press-releases/julia-mahamid-receives-embo-gold-medal-2023/