Speaker

Dr. Joshua Mendell is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Dr. Mendell attained his undergraduate degree in Biology at Cornell University in 1996 and completed an M.D.-Ph.D degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2004. He then joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins where he established a research program focused on the regulation and function of noncoding RNAs in normal physiology and in diseases such as cancer. Early in his career, Dr. Mendell made major contributions to our understanding of the microRNA (miRNA) pathway, revealing new mechanisms of miRNA regulation and uncovering novel functions for miRNAs in physiology and disease. More recently, the Mendell laboratory has elucidated new functions for other types of noncoding RNAs, including long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), and transfer RNAs (tRNAs). Dr. Mendell has also discovered important new mechanisms that regulate mRNA translation and stability. Dr. Mendell has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Allan C. Davis Medal for the Outstanding Young Scientist in the State of Maryland in 2007, the AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research in 2010, the O’Donnell Award from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science, and Technology in 2016, and the Paul Marks Prize in 2019. Dr. Mendell was appointed as an HHMI Early Career Scientist in 2009 and an HHMI Investigator in 2015. In 2025, Dr. Mendell was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Mendell relocated his laboratory to UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2011 where his laboratory continues to study RNA biology in health and disease.

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