Yogesh Kulathu awarded Lister Research Prize Fellowship

Published On Wed 14 Jun 2017 by Grant Hill

The University of Dundee’s Dr Yogesh Kulathu has received a coveted £200,000 prize after being identified as one of the brightest emerging stars in the field of biomedical research.

Dr Kulathu has been awarded a Lister Research Prize Fellowship. These prestigious and highly sought-after prizes are given annually by the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine to up to five young researchers in the UK and are intended to help support and nurture future research leaders.

The prize may be used in any appropriate way to support the holder’s research, other than the provision or augmentation of personal salary, over a period of up to five years. The Fellowships are intended to provide funding which will enhance or expand an on-going research activity or enable a new area to be developed. The perceived beneficial ‘impact’ of the Prize on the recipient and their career is a key factor in the selection process.

“I am very happy to receive this award,” said Dr Kulathu, who is based in the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC-PPU) at Dundee’s School of Life Sciences. “This Lister Prize will allow my lab to pursue a completely new avenue of research. I also look forward to interacting and collaborating with Lister Fellows past and present.”

Dr Kulathu’s research aims to understand how protein ubiquitylation regulates cellular homeostasis and function. Failure to degrade misfolded and damaged proteins in a timely manner is an underlying cause of diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. The Lister Research Prize will enable Dr Kulathu’s group to investigate the roles of FUBI, an unstudied ubiquitin-like modifier in the maintenance of a functional proteome.

MRC-PPU Director Professor Dario Alessi congratulated Dr Kulathu on his award, saying, “This is a fantastic and richly deserved accolade for Yogesh and one that will provide him with a unique opportunity to use his expertise and talent to decipher an entirely new unexplored area of signal transduction. Yogesh is the first MRC-PPU-based investigator to receive this prestigious award and we are delighted at his achievement.”

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