Bio:

Dr. Sarah Slavoff is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry at the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology working with Alice Ting, where she developed technologies for enzymatic biotinylation and fluorophore labeling of interacting proteins. During her NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Alan Saghatelian at Harvard University, Dr. Slavoff developed the first high-sensitivity liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry peptidomic technology for detection of micropeptides, revealing nearly 100 previously undiscovered, short human genes. She subsequently identified MRI-2/CYREN, a micropeptide that regulates non-homologous end joining, the major pathway of DNA double strand break repair in human cells. Since starting her independent research group at Yale in 2014, Dr. Slavoff has continued to innovate new quantitative and chemoproteomic approaches for functional micropeptide discovery, as well as cellular and molecular characterization of micropeptides. Her group was the first to demonstrate that a micropeptide, alt-RPL36, regulates the PI3K signaling pathway, and that phosphorylation of the NBDY micropeptide regulates formation of membraneless organelles in human cells. Dr. Slavoff was named a Searle Scholar in 2016, and received a 2019 Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award and a 2020 Yale University Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research or Publication.