With decades of expertise our groundbreaking discoveries have earned the trust of the scientific community worldwide. With 20 active faculty members and growing, the RNA Center at UC Santa Cruz continues to push the limits of what is possible in RNA science.
Breakthrough Prize
In 2017, Center for Molecular Biology of RNA Founder and Director Harry Noller was selected for the highly competitive and prestigious Breakthrough Prize for his transformative discovery of the centrality of RNA in forming the active centers of the ribosome—the fundamental machinery of protein synthesis in all cells—thereby connecting modern biology to the origin of life and also explaining how many natural antibiotics disrupt protein synthesis. This groundbreaking work at UCSC powered the formation of the RNA Center, attracting extraordinary talent to join Noller in building a powerhouse research enterprise here.
Nobel Prize
In 2020, Dr. Carol Greider, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, joined the UCSC biology faculty. Greider was attracted to UC Santa Cruz by both the RNA Center’s scientific strengths and the university’s core commitments to expanding opportunities for historically underrepresented populations and women in science.
In 2017, Center for Molecular Biology of RNA Founder and Director Harry Noller was selected for the highly competitive and prestigious Breakthrough Prize for his transformative discovery of the centrality of RNA in forming the active centers of the ribosome—the fundamental machinery of protein synthesis in all cells—thereby connecting modern biology to the origin of life and also explaining how many natural antibiotics disrupt protein synthesis. This groundbreaking work at UCSC powered the formation of the RNA Center, attracting extraordinary talent to join Noller in building a powerhouse research enterprise here.
Global Impact
Ranked among the top computer scientists in the world, David Haussler pioneered the use of hidden Markov models, stochastic context-free grammars, and the discriminative kernel method for analyzing RNA, DNA, and protein sequences. As a collaborator on the international Human Genome Project, Haussler’s team at
UC Santa Cruz posted the first publicly available computational assembly of the human genome
sequence on the Internet on July 7, 2000. Following this, Haussler and his team developed the UCSC Genome Browser, a web-based tool that is used extensively around the world and is essential for biomedical research and serves as the platform for several large-scale genomics projects. Haussler’s work has accelerated the understanding of cancer, human development, evolution, and neuroscience.
