Prestigious award to Umeå molecular biologist

Changchun Chen is associate professor at Department of molecular biology at Umeå University

ImageIngrid Söderbergh

For me it is a signal of encouragement to keep going

“I feel great! It was totally a surprise since there are so many excellent young scientists at Umeå University and in Sweden who are doing really great research", says Changchun Cheng, associate professor at the Department of molecular biology at Umeå University. “For me it is a signal of encouragement to keep going”.

The jury’s motivation is “… for having elucidated neural processes that regulate physiological and behavioural adaptations for survival under extreme living conditions using the nematode C. elegans as a model”.

Changchun Chen is a molecular biologist into basic research and has worked at Umeå University since the beginning of 2018. Using C. elegans as the primary model, he and his group focus on uncovering novel and conserved mechanisms that drive behavioural and physiological responses to stress conditions. This includes hypoxia-induced eating disorders, the remarkable tolerance of certain animals to complete oxygen deprivation, and the neuronal and immune responses to bacterial pathogens.

“The reason why I use C. elegans as model system in my experiments is that it is one of the simplest animals with a nervous system, yet it is genetically very powerful, with a rich set of tools available for research”, says Changchun Chen.

Importantly, many genes and cellular processes are highly conserved between C. elegans and humans, which allows researchers to gain molecular insights that can often be translated to more complex systems. Some well-known examples are programmed cell death, RNAi, and microRNAs.

Before coming to Umeå University, Changchun Chen studied preventive medicine at Shanghai Medical College, followed by a doctoral thesis in yeast genetics at Umeå University under the supervision of Professor Anders Byström, and completed by postdoctoral training at Cambridge UK, studying neural control of aggregation behaviour in C. elegans.

The prize ceremony will take place on 27 November in Stockholm.