Sarah Slavoff received Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award

Monday, June 24, 2019

Congratulations to Dr. Sarah Slavoff, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, who has received a Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award for her project “Non-Canonical Translation of Small Open Reading Frames in the Human Genome.”

Over the past decade, new technologies have enabled the discovery that regions of the human genome once thought to be non-coding actually produce thousands of functional polypeptides encoded in small open reading frames (smORFs) that have been invisible to geneticists – until now. From her lab at the Yale Chemical Biology Institute, Slavoff’s project seeks to understand the mechanism and regulation of smORF translation in cells.

The Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award was created in 2017 to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences. The Award supports the pursuit of high impact ideas to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical research. The awards fund high-risk, high-reward pilot projects solicited from the brightest junior faculty in the region.