Chang-Zheng Chen wins Keck award

Chang-Zheng Chen, PhD

The W.M. Keck Foundation has selected Chang-Zheng Chen, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology, as one of its five 2009 Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research. As an award recipient, Chen will receive a five-year grant totaling $1 million.

Keck initiated this award program in 1998 to support promising young scientists whose cutting-edge biomedical research addresses fundamental mechanisms of human disease. This program is specifically dedicated to ease the difficulty young investigators have securing traditional funding for risky or creative research during the early part of their careers, when they often make their boldest discoveries.

Chen, who is also a member of Stanford's Cancer Center, studies microRNA, a class of small nucleic-acid transcripts that are not used as templates for proteins, as are the longer, protein-coding molecules called messenger RNA. Rather, microRNA molecules regulate the degree to which the genetic information carried on messenger RNA transcripts results in the production of proteins within cells. MicroRNA has been shown to play diverse functional roles in animals and has been implicated in human disease processes as well.

Chen has been on the faculty at the medical school since 2005. He earned his PhD at Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and did postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. He is currently a member of the Baxter Laboratory in Genetic Pharmacology at Stanford University School of Medicine.