McKnight wins Lasker Award

Steven McKnight was recently honored with the 2025 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which he shared with Dirk Görlich of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. This award recognizes scientists who have made fundamental discoveries on the frontiers of basic biomedical research. Albert Lasker was an American businessman who pioneered modern advertising as an executive at Lord & Thomas. McKnight was presented with this research prize, which carries a $250,000 honorarium, at a gala ceremony in September.

Steven McKnight

McKnight is the distinguished chair in basic biomedical research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. His research spans several major themes, including transcription factors and gene regulation, oxygen sensing and low-complexity domains, or LCDs, for which he was recognized. LCDs are regions of proteins that do not form three-dimensional structures and contain low amino acid variability. As a result of McKnight’s discoveries, what were once deemed junk protein segments are now known to be active species that can help organize nuclear and cytoplasmic compartments.

McKnight is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards and honors include the Welch Award in Chemistry, the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Monsanto Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Eli Lilly Award from the American Society for Microbiology and the Newcomb Cleveland Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. McKnight served as president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from 2014 to 2016 and is an ASBMB fellow.

“By chasing down the outrageously irrelevant observation, we came to realize how protein domains of low sequence complexity work,” McKnight said in his acceptance remarks at the Lasker Awards ceremony in New York City, reflecting on his work investigating LCDs.