October 7, 2015 - The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Paul Modrich, Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University, Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in the UK, and Aziz Sancar of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are the recipients of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

​Robert J. Lefkowitz MD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Professor of Biochemistry who has spent his entire 39-year research career at the Duke University Medical Center, is sharing the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Brian K. Kobilka of Stanford University School of Medicine, who was a post-doctoral fellow in Lefkowitz's lab in the 1980s.  Photo by Duke University Photography

Dr. Kate Meyer is a 2018 winner of the Avenir Award for Genetics or Epigenetics of Substance Use Disorders given by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Her research project seeks to understand how mRNA methylation contributes to the gene expression changes that underlie addiction.

Avenir means future in French, and this award looks toward the future by supporting early stage investigators who propose innovative studies, high impact research and show promise of being tomorrow's leaders. Awardees may study novel methods or approaches that can potentially be applied to the analysis of the genetics or epigenetics of addiction.