Professor Michael Lawson has been awarded the highly prestigious Early Stage Investigator Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (ESI MIRA) R35 grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
The Lawson Lab uses biochemical, biophysical and structural techniques to examine mechanisms of eukaryotic (cells with membrane-bound nuclei) translational quality control. The award of $1.9 million will support Lawson’s research focused on the interplay of protein synthesis and messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) decay over a five-year period.
The MIRA program supports investigators’ overall research through a single, unified grant rather than individual ones. The goal of the award is to provide investigators with greater stability and flexibility and to help enhance scientific productivity and the likelihood of important breakthroughs.
Lawson obtained his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Pomona College in 2009 and a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. Following his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, Lawson joined the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty in 2023. He holds the Randy Schekman and Sabeeha Merchant Chair.
