2024 RecipienT

Hashim Al-Hashimi

Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
Columbia University
Dr. Hashim M. Al-Hashimi is the Roy & Diana Vagelos Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Greece, Italy, Jordan, and the UK. Dr. Al-Hashimi received his Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry from Yale University in 2000 working with Dr. James H. Prestegard. There, he developed methods based on the measurement of residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) in partially oriented systems to study the structure and dynamics of proteins. Between 2000 and 2002, Dr. Al-Hashimi was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Dinshaw J. Patel at the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he turned his attention toward using NMR to study the structural dynamics of nucleic acids. A year into his postdoctoral training, Dr. Al-Hashimi accepted an offer to join the faculty at the University of Michigan. There he rose through the ranks and, seven years later, was named the Robert L Kuczkowski Professor of Chemistry and Biophysics. In 2014, Dr. Al-Hashimi joined the faculty at the Duke University School of Medicine, where he was the James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry and Director of the Duke Center for RNA Biology. He joined the Columbia faculty on May 1, 2022. As a principal investigator, Dr. Al-Hashimi and his trainees pioneered the development and application of NMR approaches for visualizing how the three-dimensional structures of DNA and RNA molecules change with time at the atomic level. These technological advances resulted in a deeper and more quantitative understanding of many fundamental cellular processes, including the mechanisms of cancer-causing mutations and gene regulation by non-coding RNAs. Dr. Al-Hashimi also pioneered NMR approaches for identifying RNA-targeting therapeutics using RNA dynamics, and in 2009, he co-founded Base4 Inc to enable RNA-targeted drug discovery. He is the recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, the Founder’s Medal in NMR Spectroscopy, the Agilent Thought Leader Award, and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology. He is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and the International Society of Magnetic Resonance. Popular Science Magazine listed Dr. Al-Hashimi among the ‘Brilliant 10’ scientists and engineers in the USA.