UT professor’s gene editing research wins 2025 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award

, General Life&Arts Reporter February 18, 2025 Courtesy of Keiko Torii Ilya Finkelstein with Keiko Torii at the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology (TAMEST) annual conference. As a kid, Ilya Finkelstein always wanted to be a scientist. Curious about the natural world, he found himself outside, collecting butterflies and cataloging them. He enjoyed seeing how everything worked in the world. This month, the now associate professor at UT received the 2025 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology during their annual conference. The award recognized his groundbreaking research on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, known as CRISPR, biology and genome editing. Around the same time he began his postdoctoral training at Columbia University Medical Center in 2010, scientists published a higher-resolution recombination map of the human genome initially decoded in 2003. Finkelstein said this development was like the moon landing for biology and for all of mankind. This revolutionary discovery in science shaped Finkelstein’s research, particularly with CRISPR.

Archived from The Daily Texan on 2025-02-09.