BY SNEHA RAO

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in July named 12 scientists the winners of its annual awards. The newly announced recipients and one winner from 2011 will give talks at the annual meeting April 21 – 25 in San Diego.

Stuart Kornfeld, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2012 Herbert Tabor/Journal of Biological Chemistry Lectureship. The award recognizes outstanding lifetime scientific achievements and was established to honor the many contributions of Herbert Tabor to both the society and the journal, for which he served as editor for nearly 40 years and now serves as co-editor.

 Lovell Jones, a professor at both the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Houston as well as director of the joint Dorothy I. Height Center for Health Equity & Evaluation Research, won the Ruth Kirschstein Diversity in Science Award. This award honors an outstanding scientist who has shown a strong commitment to the encouragement of under-represented minorities to enter the scientific enterprise or to the effective mentorship of those within it. Jones has been devoted to diversity issues in the scientific community, with a major emphasis on both addressing the under-representation of minorities at all levels in academia, industry and government as well as health disparities in the U.S.

Susan Marqusee, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of Berkeley's California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, has been named the winner of the William C. Rose Award. The award recognizes her outstanding contributions to biochemical and molecular biological research, particularly in the field of protein folding, and her demonstrated commitment to the training of younger scientists.

Barry Honig, Columbia University professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, won the DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences for his work in macromolecular interactions in biology. The award is given to a scientist for innovative and accessible development or application of computer technology to enhance research in the life sciences at the molecular level. Honig's software tools and their underlying conceptual basis are widely used by the general biological research community to analyze the role of electrostatics in macromolecular interactions.