Richard Losick
The National Academy of Sciences has announced that Prof. Richard Losick of MCB has been awarded the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology for 2007. The biennial prize recognizes “extraordinary scientific achievement” in the field of microbiology. Prof. Losick was awarded for “discovering alternative bacterial sigma factors and [for] his fundamental contributions to understanding the mechanism of bacterial sporulation.”
The Waksman Award was established by a gift of the Foundation for Microbiology and has been presented since 1968. Prof. Losick expressed his excitement over the honor, one of only 18 awards the National Academy announced for 2007 in all the sciences: “This is a big thrill for me, and is all the more special in that the very first [Waksman] winner in 1968 is our dear colleague Jack Strominger. Also, and by coincidence, the very organism, Streptomyces, that Selman Waksman used in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of streptomycin has been the subject of long standing interest in my lab.”
A $5000 prize is included in the honor.
