Leading RNA researcher elected to UK's Royal Society

Joan A. Steitz, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has been elected to the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. The Society recognized Steitz for her pioneering work on the assembly of messenger RNAs, the molecules responsible for making proteins based on the instructions found in DNA. She is one of 10 non-British scientists elected to the Society’s 2014 class.