IIGB/CEPCEB researcher Xuemei Chen has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for her excellence in original scientific research. Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors given to a scientist or engineer in the United States.

Elected along with 83 other new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries, Chen brings the number of current IIGB faculty elected to the NAS to four (three in CEPCEB – Chen, Natasha Raikhel, Susan Wessler; one in CDVR – Alexander Raikhel) out of 6 at UCR.

There are currently 2,179 active NAS members. Among the NAS’s renowned members are Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Alexander Graham Bell. Nearly 200 living NAS members have won Nobel Prizes.

Chen started her independent career as an assistant professor at the Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, NJ, in 1999. During the studies of floral patterning genes, she and her group became one of the first discoverers of microRNAs in plants and subsequently a major force in dissecting the biogenesis, modification, and degradation of microRNAs.

In 2005, she won the Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence at Rutgers University. Chen moved to UC Riverside in 2005, and was promoted to full professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences in 2009 and an endowed chair professor in 2010.

She is frequently invited to speak at key national and international meetings where her seminal contributions have established her as a recognized leader in both the plant and RNA silencing research communities. In 2011, she was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute – Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator. She is the recipient of the prestigious Charles Albert Shull award from the American Society of Plant Biologists and the University Scholar Award from UCR.