IIGB Director Natasha Raikhel was announced the recipient of the 2013 American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) Adolph E. Gude, Jr., Award. This monetary award is granted every three years in recognition of outstanding service to the plant biology field.

Raikhel is being recognized for making lasting scientific contributions to plant biology with her studies in the field of protein trafficking, including fascinating work on the vacuole, cell wall biosynthesis, nuclear import signaling, and lectins. Her work ranges over the broad areas of plan biochemistry and plant cell biology, and her extrardinary discoveries in these realms have proved to be extremely relevant to plant growth and development as well. She was the first to correctly identify a plant vacuolar targeting domain, the first to identify components of the targeting machinery in plant cells and the first to analyze nuclear localization signals in plants. Her lab applied a chemical genomics approach to discover additional processes involved in protein trafficking and the developmental mechanism dependent upon these processes. Her work has resulted in several major publications in the past few years, which have become seminal literature for chemical genomicists studying a range of eukaryotes.

Raikhel also received this award for building a strong and innovative group of plant biologists at UC Riverside and for her service to the plant community. She has served on numerous advisory and editorial boards and was Editor in Chief at the journal Plant Physiology from 2000 to 2005. During her tenure at Plant Physiology, her vision and tireless efforts transformed Plant Physiology into a flagship journal in plant biology. She made efficient use of the journal as the media to promote basic research with model organisms as well as translational research to transfer knowledge gained from model organisms into crops.She also use the journal to bring key issues that ranged from the technical to the ethical to the attention of plant biologists.

As director of UCR’s Center for Plant Cell Biology from 2002 to 2012 and director of the Institute of Integrative Genome Biology since 2005, Raikhel was instrumental in establishing a state-of-the-art research infrastructure that serves the entire campus, including plant biology labs. The Genomics core facility, the Bioinformatics core facility, the Proteomics core facility and the Imaging core facility all house cutting-edge instrumentation and are managed by professional PhD-level academic personnel who provide quality services and give regular workshops to students and postdocs. High-throughput instruments have allowed biologists on campus to incorporate genomics approaches into their toolboxes. Raikhel has also promoted research and education by forging strong interdisciplinary interactions between UCR’s plant and fungal biologists, analytical and synthetic chemists, computational biologists and mechanical and bioengineers.

The award, created by the Society 30 years ago, is named after the Gude Family who made possible the establishment of the Gude Plant Science Center.