Two UAB faculty lauded as among 100 inspiring black scientists in America
UAB's Farah Lubin (left) and Michelle Gray have been named among the country's 100 inspiring black scientists by Cross Talk. (Bob Shepard/UAB)
Two scientists on the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been named to a list of 100 inspiring black scientists in America by a national blog.
Farah Lubin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology, and Michelle Gray, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Neurology, made the list published by Cross Talk, the official blog of Cell Press, a leading publisher of cutting-edge biomedical and physical science research and reviews.
The blog’s guest author is Antentor Hinton Jr., Ph.D., a Ford Foundation and Burroughs Wellcome Fund postdoctoral fellow at the University of Iowa.
“There’s a plethora of black scientists who make significant contributions to science, but many of them are unknown to the masses,” Hinton said in the article. “It’s imperative that young black scientists know about the myriad accomplished scientists from African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx and African American backgrounds in the fields of life sciences, chemistry, engineering and physics.”
Lubin is the director of the Neuroscience Roadmap Scholars Program, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. She is also a scientist in the Comprehensive Center for Healthy Aging, the Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics and the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. Her research focuses on learning, memory and synaptic plasticity, epigenetics, non-coding RNAs gene transcription, epilepsy disorders, neurodevelopment and developmental disabilities.
Gray is the Dixon Scholar in Neuroscience in the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics, a scientist in the Comprehensive Neuroscience Center and the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, and co-director for the School of Medicine’s Summer in Biomedical Sciences Undergraduate Research Program. Her research focuses on the pathogenesis of Huntington’s disease with a specific interest in astrocytes, as well as cardiac abnormalities in Huntington’s disease and X-linked dystonia Parkinsonism.
The Cross Talk list includes 75 established investigators, including Lubin and Gray, who range from tenure-track assistant professors to full professors and 25 scientists whom the author labels as rising stars.
Visit Cross Talk to see the list in its entirety.
This story originally appeared on the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s UAB News website.
