Julia Mahamid receives EMBO Gold Medal 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.

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